The
Monkeyface
Chronicles
OTHER BOOKS BY RICHARD SCARSBROOK
Cheeseburger Subversive (Thistledown Press)
Featherless Bipeds (Thistledown Press)
Destiny’s Telescope (Turnstone Books)
The
Monkeyface
Chronicles
RICHARD
SCARSBROOK
©Richard Scarsbrook, 2010
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Accesss Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Thistledown Press Ltd.
118-20th Street West
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, S7M 0W6
www.thistledownpress.com
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Scarsbrook, Richard
The monkeyface chronicles / Richard Scarsbrook.
ISBN 978-1-897235-76-8
I. Title.
PS8587.C396M65 2010 C813’.54 C2010-900916-9
Cover photograph (detail) ©Nikolay Mamluke/istockphoto.com
Author photo: Ken Tsung
Cover and book design by Jackie Forrie
Printed and bound in Canada
Thistledown Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for its publishing program.
For Nicole,
with love and gratitude
and to
Mom and Dad,
for those very first words
CONTENTS
As Witnessed
Part One
Grum and Grunt
Escape From Faireville
Stainless Steel
Yellow to Blue
Brown Is Not a Colour
The Meaning of Know
Make Big Bucks
Jacob’s Ladder
Part Two
Metamorphosis
Day of Reckoning
Gears and Wheels
City Girl
Ten Pounds
Finding the Angel
Night Lights
Lightning and Flames
Airborne
Yellow Light
Part Three
Morphine
Confessional
Pain and Gain
Pretty Boy
Homecoming
Undercover Blues
From the Ashes
Fourteen Hands
A Future Winter
The Good Stuff
As Witnessed
It is their first date.
The man holds the woman’s hand as she steps over a pile of loose stones recently fallen from the cliff wall. “Worth the climb down?” he asks.
“Worth it,” she says, sighing. She looks again at the last orange embers of daylight blinking on the lake’s choppy surface. Then they turn to face each other, legs pressed together, hips fused, chest against chest. She closes her eyes as they kiss. And then opens them and pulls away, “Oh, my God! Did you hear that?”
“Just the waves crashing,” he says.
She wriggles from his embrace, points up the shoreline to where the jagged cliffside curves away from the beach. “Over there!”
She scrambles over the shifting stones toward a metallic glint in the distance. He rushes after her. The smell of gasoline and burnt rubber push through the damp, fishy air.
It’s a motorcycle. Or what’s left of a motorcycle, its gas tank crushed and its frame twisted. The rear wheel turns one last slow orbit. Steam hisses from the engine, slapped by foamy waves.
She staggers toward the severed handlebars, forks, and warped front wheel, which stick out of the pebbles at the water’s edge. “Oh! Oh! Oh!” She pants, jumping up and down, gripping her face. “Oh my God oh my God oh my God!”
The rider, or what’s left of him, is twisted on the rocks like a tangled string puppet. His face is a smear of glistening crimson. “Jesus Christ,” the man says, “I think his chest is moving!”
A sound erupts from the bloody, pulpy face. A sound like an endless dry heave. The wail of a mournful ghost.
“My God, how . . . he’s still alive!”
The man will fumble for his cell phone, punch 9-1-1. The woman will sit on a flat-topped stone, rocking back and forth and staring at the length of severed brake cable in her hands, until the emergency personnel wrap her in a blanket and usher her into an ambulance.
It will be their last date.
Part One
Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.
— John Barth
Winter, 2001
Grum and Grunt
The fluorescent lights hum ominously over our heads. Miss Underwood is hunched over her desk, her red pen tick-tick-ticking like a metronome as she grades our spelling quizzes. A girl clears her throat, and the sound resonates against the cement-block walls like a roll of thunder. Nervous coughs punctuate the silence.
I’m already finished my math sheet, so I just look out the window, where the sky churns shades of grey. Wind whistles at the cracks in the dried-putty caulking. A storm is brewing.
None of the back-row boys force loud farts, nor do they “accidentally” drop textbooks. Everyone just waits.
Welcome to classroom 8-C, the unofficial grade eight “dumb class” at Faireville Public School. Across the hall, classroom 8-A is populated mostly by kids who get A grades and play on all the sports teams and come from wealthy old-money families with big lace-covered homes in Victoria Park. The kids next door in 8-B are predominantly well-behaved, good-citizen types from the new subdivisions. The leftovers — the bullies, the idiots and the misfits — are tossed into 8-C. Most of them come from the junk-strewn trailer park by the highway out of town, or from that long row of bow-roofed shacks parallel to the railroad tracks.
I’m not quite sure what I’m doing here in 8-C. I get 100 percent on practically everything I hand in. I was the only kid in 8-C to make it to the school-wide spelling bee, and my project on genetic mutations won first prize in the Biology category of the Plympwright County Science Fair. I’ve read every volume from A to Z of the World Book and Britannica encyclopedias, so I can answer almost any question the teachers ask in Science, Geography and History class (although I’ve learned that it is better for my health to keep my hand down and my mouth shut).
Maybe someone at the school board office got wind of the fact that our school was disobeying the “no-streaming policy,” and they stuck me into 8-C in some vain attempt to balance the academic profile of the class. Maybe, because until this year I was home-schooled by my mother, the Principal just assumed that I would be behind the other “normal” eighth-graders. Maybe they didn’t put me into class 8-A because that’s the class my twin brother Michael is in.
The simplest explanation for my placement in 8-C, though, is my face. I suffer from a rather extreme facial deformity. A mutation in my IRF6 gene (which stands for “Interferon Regulatory Factor 6”) caused me to be born with a cleft lip, unusual teeth, and a flattened nose. Medical scientists have named my condition “Van der Woude Syndrome,” but most of my classmates just call me “Monkeyface.” They say it mostly behind my back now, since my twin brother Michael has offered to make their own faces look even worse than mine if he ever hears them say it.
Mich
ael and I are not the only twin brothers in the school; Graham and Grant Brush are no longer allowed to be in the same class together, since they used to constantly distract each other and their classmates. Schoolyard rumour has it that, as a team, Grum and Grunt have driven at least one teacher into early retirement. Seeing their barrel-shaped shadows lurching toward you at recess is pure, cold terror. You are automatically outnumbered. They always work in tandem. When the beady black bulldog eyes of Grum zero in on you, you know that Grunt will be right behind him. And vice versa.
Unlike Grum and Grunt, who are identical twins, Michael and I are the non-identical fraternal kind. This is a fortunate thing for Michael. Unlike me, he has an architecturally perfect face: sky-blue eyes, wavy dark hair, strong cheekbones, square jaw, and a straight, chiseled nose. He is strong, smart, kind and handsome. Every teacher wants Michael in their class, every boy wants Michael on his team at recess, and every girl wants him to be her boyfriend.
Despite Michael’s efforts to protect me from the recess chants of “Monkeyface! Monkeyface!” it would be naïve to not see the comparison myself. The facial features created by that one messed-up gene are in fact quite simian, and my mess of dark hair and my big brown eyes just add to the effect. So, the kid with the monkey face got tossed into the classroom full of kids with monkey IQs. I’m sure it made sense to the Powers That Be at the Board of Education.
Classroom 8-C is so uncharacteristically quiet I can hear my pulse pounding in my eardrums. All of the jerks whose desks surround mine are pretending to work on their math sheets. Sam Simpson doesn’t flick bits of eraser at me, or whisper threats of “Dead at recess, Monkeyface.” Trevor Blunt refrains from reaching stealthily across the aisle to scribble “ass fag” on my pencil case. The agitators are all silent.
But this is no peaceful quiet.
Grant Brush, the notorious Grunt, has been sent to the Principal’s office by Miss Underwood. This is unprecedented. Teachers usually make deals with Grant. He enjoys a sort of diplomatic immunity at Faireville Public School, since his father is the Principal.
Grunt spent the morning spitting chewed-up bits of paper into Cecil Bundy’s hair, but that wasn’t the reason for his departure. Grunt sat there with pencils pushed into his nostrils, but that didn’t earn him a reprimand, either, until, accompanied by a chorus of giggles from the boys seated around him, Grant Brush chanted, just loud enough to be heard: “Miss Underwood, Miss Underwear, wet underwear, wet underneath, Miss Underwood.”
The scratching of chalk on the front board abruptly stopped.
“Did you have something to say, Mr. Brush?” Miss Underwood demanded.
“Mr. Brush is my dad’s name. I think you know him.”
This got a few laughs from Grant’s minions.
“Did you have something to say then, Grant?”
“Nope. Do you, Miss Underwood?”
Miss Underwood’s cheeks were tinged with red, but she returned to the chalkboard. “So, you carry the three, and be sure to move the decimal up . . . ”
“Miss Underwood, Miss Underwear, wet underwear, wet underneath, Miss Underwood.”
“What did you say, Grant?” Miss Underwood hissed.
“Huh? Who, me?”
“Yes, you.”
“Oh, I didn’t say anything, wet underwear . . . er, I mean, Miss Underwood.”
“Excuse me?”
“Sorry, Miss Underwood, slip of the tongue!”
Miss Underwood’s face flushed red. “Get out!” she shrieked. “Get out, you, you . . . ” Her voice trailed off.
“No name-calling, Miss Underwood. Name-calling hurts students’ self-esteem! It’s in your Teacher’s Handbook.”
“Out,” she stammered. “Out! Out!”
Grant rose to his feet and hooked his thumbs into his belt loops. “No problem, Miss Underwood. I’ll just go visit Dad in his office.”
He strode from the room, the door clicking shut behind him.
Miss Underwood cleared her throat, and picked up a stack of sheets from the top of her desk. Her hands were shaking, but her voice was firm. “Each of you will take one of these long division worksheets and pass the rest behind you. You have the remainder of the class to work on them. Don’t forget to put your name and the date at the top of your page.”
In my tight, neat cursive, I’ve written my name, Philip Skyler, and the date, Friday, December 21, 2001. Today is the Winter Solstice, the official first day of winter. It is also the second-last day of school before Christmas Break begins. It also happens to be my thirteenth birthday, and so far nobody in Classroom 8-C seems to know about it. I would like to keep it that way.
My grandfather stopped by our house at breakfast this morning to deliver birthday gifts to Michael and me.
“These are special thirteenth birthday presents,” he said, his hazel eyes glistening as he handed each of us a small box. “My grandfather — your great, great grandfather, of course — believed that a boy’s thirteenth year was when he changed from a boy to a man. Experience has taught me that he was right.”
My older brother, Dennis, who is in his last year of high school, paused from slurping the milk from his cereal bowl, peered out from under his mane of shaggy hair and grumbled, “Hey, Grandpa, isn’t thirteen an unlucky number?”
Dennis always says “Grandpa” in the same abrasive way he calls Dad “Father,” to remind him that they are not related by blood. He calls my Mom “Mother” in the same acidic way, maybe as a reminder that he’s the product of her one pre-marital coupling. He usually refers to Michael and I as “Dickhead” and “Douchebag.” “There is no such thing as luck, Dennis,” Grandfather said, looking not at Dennis but at me. “To quote Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.’ Life will hand you whatever it’s going to hand you. What you do with it is entirely up to you.”
“Whatever,” Dennis grunted. “Eighteen is when you officially become a man in this country, not thirteen.”
I am painfully aware of this fact. The doctor we’ve visited in Toronto who specializes in my condition refuses to perform the cosmetic surgery to fix my face until after I’ve turned eighteen. “The growth of his facial bone structure will have slowed enough by then,” he said. “But, more importantly, it has to be his decision, and he has to be an adult to make it.” If the law saw things the way my grandfather does, that you change from a boy to a man at thirteen, I would be on my way to Toronto to have that surgery done today.
“Hey, Grandpa,” Dennis said, “how come I didn’t get no special present when I turned eighteen last month?”
“Didn’t get any special present,” our grandfather corrected.
From its small box, Michael removed a pocket watch on a chain. The gold plating was worn through around the edges, and the letter “S” engraved on the cover was scarcely visible. Michael flipped open the cover and held it up to his ear. “Still ticking!” he said. “Nice.”
My own present was a little jackknife, as timeworn as Michael’s watch and also faintly engraved with a stylized “S.” I unfolded the still-shining tools inside: a bottle opener, a corkscrew, a short blade and a long blade.
“I’ve been carrying this watch and jackknife in my pockets since my own grandfather gave them to me on my own thirteenth birthday,” our grandfather said. “Other than a few shillings, those were the only two things he had in his pockets when he got on the boat from Britain during the potato famine. And now they are yours. The ‘S’ on each stands for ‘Skyler,’ of course; his name, my name, your name.”
Michael and I held the small objects. Dennis rolled his eyes.
“Since Dickhead and Douchebag got the other junk out of Great-friggin’-Great Grandpa’s pockets, are you gonna give me the money? With inflation, it might be enough to get me outta this shithole town.”
Our grandfather’s eyes flared, and he straightened to his full height of six-foot-four, his thick silver hair almost brushing the kitchen light fixtures. “De
nnis,” he rumbled, “this is their day, not yours.”
“It’s never my friggin’ day,” Dennis muttered from behind his veil of hair.
Our grandfather looked at my twin brother, his eyes softening again. “Michael,” he said, “winding that watch every day for all of these years has reminded me of the value of time, how it passes so quickly, that there is always so much to accomplish. To quote Virgil, ‘Sed fugit interea, fugit irreparabile tempus’: Time meanwhile flies, never to return. Or, as Benjamin Franklin said, ‘Lost time is never found again.’”
Dennis let out a long, disparaging sigh, and mumbled, “Give it up, Captain Quote.”
My grandfather ignored Dennis and turned to me. “Philip,” he said, “having that jackknife in my pocket has always reminded me that the tools we need are almost always within our reach, and that a man is always equipped to handle what comes his way. In the words of Sir Walter Scott, “Real valor consists not in being insensible to danger; but in being prompt to confront and disarm it.’”
Dennis huffed, shoved his chair back from the kitchen table and slunk toward the back door. “Gawd, what bullshit. Grandpa is just too cheap to buy you guys new birthday presents.”
Now in the tense silence of classroom 8-C I’m finished my math sheet, and I want nothing more than to take out my grandfather’s jackknife, my jackknife, and turn it over and over in my hand, to feel its weight against my palm. But I know better than to display anything of value amongst this pack of scavengers, so I just gaze out the window, watching the grey clouds swirl and collide.
The thermometer that hangs outside the classroom window reads five degrees Celsius. There will be no snow today. I have been waiting for snow. A drop of just five degrees could change everything. For a little while, everything would be white and clean.
There has been snow on my birthday every year that I can remember.
The recess bell rings, and everyone exhales. Today is Miss Underwood’s day for Yard Supervision Duty, so she opens the door of her teacher’s closet and puts on her long recess coat. At the back of the classroom, the kids unhook their jackets and reach into their lunch bags for their recess snacks, and it begins to feel like things are returning to normal. Then Grant Brush strides back into the room.
The Monkeyface Chronicles Page 1