Monkey and Me

by David Gilman

  “Come on!” And he had that look that said he would kill me if I didn’t get back to the rest of them.

  I jumped down most of the stairs. Mark grabbed me.

  “Do. Not. Go. Off. On. Your. Own,” he said threateningly, his mouth close to my ear. If I hadn’t been wearing my beanie he’d have sprayed all over me.

  “There’s something upst—”

  But he pulled me into the room before I could tell him. Maybe it was better that I didn’t say anything. Panic can be a terrible thing. But I lifted one edge of the beanie so I could listen for any more sounds from the darkness upstairs.

  It was a very old-fashioned room. There were more missing memories on the walls and the floorboards moaned every time we took a step. The thin line of light from the edge of the windows showed dust floating in the air.

  Big old chairs sat on a threadbare rug that must have had a nice flower design on it at one time. A coffee table with spindly legs was in the middle and they were all nestled round the fireplace. But someone had ripped out the mantelpiece – it was probably marble like the one in the Civic Hall – and so now there was just bare brick and the black hole of the grate. If you thought about it long enough that could be a portal to the Underworld. Sometimes it’s not a good idea to have a vivid imagination like mine. Dad says I could be a politician with the stories I tell.

  There were two old cups and saucers on the coffee table and a book lay open, as if whoever had been reading it had been interrupted and left the room. The book was called The History of Lacemaking. That’s something we’ve never touched on in Mrs Carpenter’s class, but I suppose lacemaking never had much effect on the world, not like real history – wars and stuff and plagues. Though I have seen pictures of knights in the Crusades with chain mail, and who knows, maybe that came about because someone saw some old lady making lace, and thought, That’s a good idea. Instead of a lace doily I’ll make some arrow-resistant chain mail…

  “Jez!” Mark tugged my sleeve. “Stop daydreaming! Come on.”

  Candyfloss cobwebs reached down from the ceiling; bookcases, still with loads of books on them, were thick with dust. I remember Mrs Carpenter, our teacher, who is, by the way, a very good storyteller – she does all the ups and downs in her voice when she reads, that’s called intonation – she did a class project about a ghost ship. When people went on board there was still food on the table and drink in the cups, but no sign of anyone on board. That’s how this was. Eerie and ghostly and a bit weird. I thought the place would have been empty of furniture. I suddenly felt as though I was in someone’s lounge and I almost shouted, “Is there anybody home?”

  But I didn’t, just in case someone answered.

  I picked up the book and blew the dust off it. Sometimes in the front of books the person whose book it is writes their name. Sometimes there’s what they call a bookplate, which says Ex Libris. This one had a piece of paper stuck in the front with lots of dates stamped on it. The last one was 1988. It was a library book and it was overdue by twenty-five years.

  What happened next was definitely not my fault. Old houses have woodworm, everyone knows that. They scoff all the timbers in the house. Sometimes you can’t see where. So when I put the book back on the shelves – I did it without even thinking – they swayed for a second. When you see a film about a ship sinking and everything leans to one side – that’s what this was like. I thought I was having another faint, but it wasn’t me falling down, it was those hundreds of books.

  It was an avalanche of books and I nearly got smothered.

  Everyone jumped and shrieked.

  “Beanie!”

  “It wasn’t me!” I shouted, but we were choking on the cloud of dust billowing up from the disintegrated bookshelves.

  Rocky was crouching, Pete-the-Feet was behind his hair, Skimp was scrunched down with his hands over his head as if the roof was caving in and Mark was…

  Suddenly, Mark pulled himself out of the dust and mountain of books. I think it was the top shelf and the complete 1947 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica that had rendered him momentarily unconscious. He staggered a bit, choked and coughed and pointed at me. But before he could say anything Skimp hissed.

  “Sshhhhh. What’s that?”

  If someone could have taken a photograph right at that moment it would have shown the five of us frozen stiff, eyes wide, knees bent ready to run, and mouths open.

  We held our breath.

  Nothing.

  “I don’t hear anything,” Rocky whispered.

  “No. Me neither,” said Mark. “It must have been the—”

  Suddenly there was a rapid series of thumps across the ceiling. Someone running! Something was up there! And then it screamed! It was a scream that would have made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up – if I’d had any. Thump-thump-thump. The creature was pounding down the stairs.

  I don’t know who yelled first, it makes no difference, we ran like demented sheep.

  That’s known as panic.

  And then suddenly I was in the dark. I’d turned the wrong way. I was on my own. I tripped and fell headlong into the dark passage. I was trapped. And I could hear the creature from the haunted house getting closer.

  I was nine years, eleven months and nine days old, and I wanted to be ten.

  Mark told me later that they didn’t miss me until they got on the other side of the gates and by then it was nearly dark. There was a brief Emergency Meeting of the Executive Council about why I wasn’t with them.

  Legs chewed off seemed to be the best answer.

  Then: why I hadn’t screamed like them?

  Swallowed head first seemed the most likely reason.

  Then: what to do?

  Brotherly love can only be expected to go so far. That’s not to say Mark wasn’t worried, he was – he had to think of what to tell Mum and Dad. He said he’d told them that I was sleeping over at Skimp’s, who’s got a new X-Box. And Mum had said she hoped I wasn’t playing any violent video games.

  He promised her I wasn’t.

  Whatever it was scuffled like a huge rat and I could hear it snorting. Maybe Peacock’s Feather had been in here breeding and had created a monster beyond description. It probably drooled blood and ate any living flesh it could find. I held my breath. It was just there at the end of the dark patch where the light filtered down the stairs. I couldn’t see it because it had edged into the darkness. All I could hear was my heart pounding away in my chest trying to find a way out. Then something in the darkness moved. I pushed my shoulders back against an old door – and pushed – and pushed!

  It gave way and I was suddenly in another part of the big old country house kitchen. Moonlight slanted through a skylight high in the ceiling. Huge wooden tables and big slate floors made it look like a medieval torture chamber. I scrabbled backwards as fast as I could, keeping my eyes on the open door, and then I heard it coming! I closed my eyes. And screamed! Then I fell like a bag of cement and felt the wind whistle out of me. That really hurt, and I kept my eyes tightly closed. If I couldn’t see it, then it might not see me.

  Then it was on me.

  In an instant I decided to play dead. If it thought I was as dead as a pork chop it might not tear me to pieces. But I couldn’t stop screaming. Then I realised it wasn’t me making all that noise – it was the monster. Screaming and chattering and howling like a mad monkey in a zoo.

  It was a monkey!

  A flat-nosed hairy face with big brown eyes was sniffing me and its breath was worse than Peacock’s Feather’s. I looked at it and it looked at me. I think it was more frightened than I was. Though I wouldn’t like to take bets on that.

  Me terrified.

  Chimpanzee terrified.

  Words were trying to come out my mouth, but they couldn’t connect with my brain, and I heard myself say: “My name is Beanie and I won’t hurt you. I promise.” As if I could do anything – it was sitting on my chest and had a very peculiar smell, a bit like a wet dog who has rol
led in something not that nice.

  The chimpanzee’s teeth grinned down at me, its lips pulled back, and then it made funny whoo whoo whoo sounds and screamed again. I nearly wet myself.

  Then it jumped off me and drummed the floor with its feet and hands. I still couldn’t escape because it was between me and the door. I sat up and gently edged towards the big table legs. I thought if I tried to run it would just jump on my back and bite my head off. So I decided the best course of action was to be as quiet as possible and hope it didn’t hear my heart beating as loudly as its hands on the floor. I promise you it was so loud we could have had a drumming session together.

  It stopped and looked at me. It seemed a little nervous. Its eyes darted around the room but kept coming back to me, checking me out, seeing if I was going to… do what? Attack it? Neither of us moved. I smiled as bravely as I could.

  It pulled back its lips and bared its teeth. So did I. I thought that if I did what it did it might not attack me and it might understand how scared I was. The monkey looked at me and put its hand over its face and peeped through its fingers. So did I. Then it drummed the stone floor again with the palms of its hands and made a screeching noise. So I tried that as well. The monkey seemed to go a bit berserk. It did a couple of back flips, a tumble, rolled over on its head and sat down again looking at me. I didn’t think I could manage that.

  Suddenly it stood up, raised its arms above its head and grabbed an old soup ladle and started banging it against the cupboards. I got the fright of my life, an even bigger fright of my life than the fright of my life I had before, because I thought it was going to attack me like a mad axe man, only this was a mad chimpanzee with a ladle. I yelled in fright. The monkey jumped, dropped the ladle and ran screeching across the work counters and tables in the kitchen, then disappeared out through a door at the other end of the room.

  Me being so scared had scared it.

  Then I suddenly felt terrible. I stood up and shouted after it, “Wait! Don’t go! It’s all right! Honest!” I could hear it scuffling as it ran in the darkness where bits of moonlight broke up the dark like a splintered mirror. And for some reason I went after it without even thinking that it might have a bigger brother somewhere in there who might not even be a chimpanzee, but a gorilla. But my brain called me stupid and reminded me that chimpanzees and gorillas aren’t the same. I could just make out the shapes of the worktops and the preparation tables in this huge kitchen. As I banged into things and tried to reach the door I had to pull a couple of cobwebs out of my face – which made me cringe – the thought of spiders did occur to me. Especially if one got into my beanie and worked its way underneath and decided to make a nest in my ear. I could have millions of tiny spiders being born inside my head and the only thing they would have to eat would be my brain. But that was an irrational thought because there was no chance a spider could get under my beanie because it was tighter than a cosy on Mum’s teapot.

  By the time I had stumbled through the kitchen I seemed to have come right round the back of the house again and I could see there was a huge cobbled courtyard with old stables and outhouses. I went down the passageway past broken windows where the boarding had rotted and given way, perhaps this was how the monkey had got inside the house. I could hear it still chattering, still running, still making lots of noise, and that’s what I followed, until I finally came to a room that had lots of old clay garden pots stacked on the floor. There was a rotten wooden door leading into a huge greenhouse. It was like a jungle in there. Plants had just kept growing year in, year out, self-seeding fruit and vegetables, but there wasn’t much left to eat that I could see. Whatever had been in here must have kept the monkey alive. Its very own private jungle. This would have made a great HQ.

  I was getting really tired and sat on a pile of sacks. I remembered they called these big old Victorian greenhouses orangeries. But I couldn’t see any oranges anywhere. The place smelled very musty, but most of the glass was still in the old frames and I supposed the big house would have once grown its vegetables there, because they wouldn’t have had a supermarket in those days. The moonlight came through the cracked glass and cobwebs and made a big lace curtain over everything. It was very pretty. And it was quiet. The monkey had stopped making any noise. Sometimes, no matter what’s going on, you just can’t keep your eyes open and I started to snuggle down into the sacks but then they popped open again when I saw the monkey sitting in front of me. It was just watching. I remembered I had a Juicy Fruit in my pocket. I carefully took the paper off and held it out. The thought of it made my mouth water but I wanted to make a peace offering. The monkey’s eyes widened and then suddenly it snatched the sweet from my fingers. It made a slobbering slurping chewing noise and then stuck its tongue out. The Juicy Fruit had made it red and I could smell the fruit on its breath, which was quite a bit better than what it smelled like before. I didn’t move, just sat there and looked at it. It reached out and touched my foot. I kept quite still and slowly put my hand out to it again, just with my palm open.

  It touched it and then I noticed for the first time that it had a plastic medical bracelet on its wrist. “Look,” I said, “I’ve got one of those.”

  The chimpanzee gazed at me and then opened the palm of its hand. Using two fingers of its other hand it pretended to scoop up make-believe food into its mouth. It was talking to me! Telling me it was hungry. I had found a monster in the haunted house and it was asking for my help. How great was that? This was a secret worth more than anything.

  “I’m going to find you some food. And I’m not going to tell anyone about you, but I have to go home now. I’ll come back tomorrow. I promise.”

  The monkey chattered its teeth and covered its eyes.

  “Don’t be scared,” I whispered. “I’ll look after you.”

  By the time I managed to get out of the Black Gate the moon was high and the frost had settled like skin on a rice pudding. It seemed like ages to get home but it only took me about half an hour and I could see Mark peering out the window looking down our street. I waved and I saw him disappear. The next thing I knew he was waiting for me outside the front door, shivering. What did he expect? He only had his pyjamas on.

  “You were at Skimp’s playing on his X-Box. So don’t forget!”

  I pushed him.

  “What was that for?” he moaned.

  “You left me at the Black Gate!”

  “We were going to come back for you later tonight. We had to wait till everybody was in bed. What was I supposed to tell Mum and Dad? I got into enough trouble when you did your factory stunt. This time they’d have killed me!”

  I thought I’d better play it up a bit and make him feel as bad as I could. Besides, I didn’t want any of them going back and finding my secret. “There’s something really terrible in there. It was howling and moaning and scraping around. I bet it’s some sort of alien creature that crawled out the sewer.”

  “You saw it!”

  “It was huge. And it had bits of entrails all over it. It definitely wasn’t human.”

  He looked at me as if he didn’t believe me. Maybe I’d overdone it by mentioning entrails.

  He nodded and pulled me in the front door. “Don’t forget what I told you.”

  “Is that you, Jez?” Mum shouted from the kitchen. She popped her head around the corner as I was taking off my coat and shoes. “There you are,” she said. “I was wondering if we were ever going to see you again. We thought you’d left home,” she teased. “I’ve got your favourite, beans on toast.”

  Delish. “And I’d like an apple,” I said.

  She looked at me for a couple of seconds and said, “All right.”

  Anyone would think I had never asked for an apple before – though I admit I hadn’t ever asked for one after beans on toast. She kept looking at me as if she wanted to find out why I had really asked for an apple. I wondered if she could smell the monkey, because she wrinkled her nose a bit, but she does that when she’s thinking.


  “It’s a strange time of day to want an apple,” she said. “Are you feeling all right?” She put her hand on my forehead just below my beanie. “You’re quite hot,” she said.

  “That’s because I’ve been running, Mum,” I told her.

  And then she did that pretend thing where she doesn’t realise that I know what she’s really thinking.

  “So you were at Rocky’s,” she said as she poured the beans onto the toast.

  I started cutting up the soggy bread and getting as much as I could inside my mouth so that she couldn’t tell when I was lying. When you’re concentrating on your food and your mouth is full, parents are easily fooled anyway. “No, I was at Skimp’s.”

  She nodded. Just testing, I could almost hear her brain say.

  I think it’s a sad day when your own mother doesn’t trust you.

  That’s called having a suspicious mind.

  Everything you Need to Know in the World says that chimpanzees are very intelligent creatures and prefer a balanced diet. Beans on toast is not considered part of their daily nourishment requirements. Fruit, nuts, seeds and insects is what they need for strong bones and healthy gums. I think I can manage everything except the insects – they can be difficult to catch in any quantity. Chimps prefer dense tropical rainforests but can also be found in secondary-growth forests, woodlands, bamboo forests, swamps, and even open savannah, the book tells me. That must be why he likes the old greenhouse, I bet it gets steaming hot in there during the day. I suppose I could always put Mum’s rubber plant in the bathroom for him and keep the shower going for some steam. Mum always says it’s like a sauna when I’m in there. And I could take him to Childwall Woods so he could do a bit of swinging on branches or I might be able to sneak him into Centre Parcs when we go on our holiday next year.

  I don’t think I can manage a bamboo forest, though, unless we could sneak him into the garden centre one night – they’ve got a bit of a patch there. I bet Dad will think of something when I eventually make the introductions. I don’t know that there are too many swamps around here. The canal is a bit rough, what with all the junk thrown in it, so we might have to give up on the swamp idea. Other than that I think we could manage.