The Singing Ape

by Justin D'Ath

  Colt looked at the circus boss. ‘Isn’t that how it happened, Captain Noah?’

  ‘Close enough,’ he said.

  The red-haired girl’s hand was raised again. ‘Why doesn’t rat flu kill rats?’

  ‘Because viruses are kind of smart,’ said Colt. He tried to remember how his mother had explained it. ‘They need somewhere to live. If every animal that caught rat flu died, then the virus would die, too. So rat flu doesn’t kill rats, it uses them to spread to other animals.’

  ‘How on earth do you know all this?’ asked Captain Noah suspiciously.

  ‘Birdy told me how the circus started.’

  ‘But where did you learn all these other details about rat flu?’

  Colt hesitated. His mum had warned him not to talk about it. But everyone was waiting for an answer. ‘My mother was there when it started,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Your mother was where?’ Captain Noah asked.

  ‘In the laboratory,’ said Colt.

  ‘What was she doing in the laboratory?’

  ‘She used to be a scientist.’

  A look of horror spread across Captain Noah’s face. ‘Don’t tell me it was your mother who caused rat flu!?’

  Colt quickly shook his head. That would be too awful even to think about. ‘Mum didn’t work on the actual experiment that went wrong,’ he said, ‘but she was doing stuff in the same laboratory. It’s what made her decide to be a vet – she wanted to stop the flu spreading and save as many animals as she could.

  ‘Mum was one of the team of scientists who developed RatVax,’ he added. Colt switched off the laser marker and replaced it in its charger. He hoped there wouldn’t be any more questions.

  He needn’t have worried. His new classmates were no longer paying him the slightest bit of attention. They were all staring up at the small, open window above Webber’s tank.

  They seemed to be listening to something.

  Colt had been too busy playing teacher to worry about anything else. Or to listen to what was going on outside. Now he heard the light patter of rain on the truck’s roof. And something else: faint singing in the distance.

  But this wasn’t like any singing Colt had heard before. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. It was just a beautiful voice making amazing music.

  Eight hands shot up. This time their owners weren’t looking at Colt (thank goodness), they were looking pleadingly at Captain Noah.

  ‘Can we go?’ someone asked.

  ‘Pleeeeeease, Captain Noah!’ begged someone else.

  ‘You’re at school,’ their fill-in teacher told them.

  ‘But he hasn’t sung for ages!’ said the girl with glasses.

  ‘Mrs Greene always lets us go,’ added Birdy.

  Captain Noah sighed. His eyes seemed drawn to the open window, too. ‘All right. But remember your manners, children. No running till you’re outside.’

  Within moments, Captain Noah and Colt were the only people left in the circus school.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Colt asked.

  ‘It’s Caruso,’ said the circus boss, who was halfway to the door himself. ‘Don’t just stand there, lad – come and see the show!’

  A big crowd had gathered in front of the large primates’ trailer. Half the circus staff were there, but most were fee-paying visitors to The Menagerie. Lots of them were holding up their wrist-phones and cameras to record Caruso’s performance.

  Light rain fell on them from the gloomy, grey sky overhead, but nobody seemed to notice.

  Colt and Captain Noah were among the last to arrive. They stood near the back. Colt couldn’t see much, but that didn’t matter – he could hear.

  Caruso was loud. His singing went on and on. It was amazing. It was beautiful. It was like nothing Colt had ever heard before and it gave him goosebumps.

  Nobody moved. They didn’t seem to notice the rain. They were mesmerised by the free concert.

  When Caruso fell silent, nobody moved. More than a hundred people stood like statues in the rain – most of them without umbrellas – waiting for the gibbon to start singing again. But he didn’t. The only sound was the steady patter of raindrops.

  Finally the crowd began to disperse. An old lady walked past Colt, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief. ‘It reminded me of birds,’ she said to someone on the other side of her.

  Colt couldn’t remember wild birds – they had all died by the time he was two years old – but there was a lump in his throat. Something about Caruso’s singing had really got to him. He felt like he did when he’d just finished a book where one of the main characters had died at the end.

  He zigzagged through the slow tide of people coming in the other direction until he reached Caruso’s trailer. A few members of the public still waited hopefully with their wrist-phones and cameras ready. Birdy was there, too, along with three other girls from the circus school.

  ‘This is Mali, Sangita and Saffron,’ she introduced them. ‘Saffron’s mum looks after the monkeys.’

  Saffron was the red-haired girl who’d been sitting at the back of the classroom. ‘And the apes,’ she added.

  Colt said hi, then looked into the cage. Caruso sat on his tyre-swing, staring right at him.

  ‘Did your mother teach Caruso how to sing?’ he asked Saffron.

  ‘No. He just does it,’ she said.

  ‘But only sometimes,’ Birdy added. ‘Nobody knows what makes him start singing.’

  ‘Or what makes him stop,’ said a voice behind them. It was Captain Noah, holding a folded circus program over his head to keep the rain off. ‘Everyone back to school, please – the show seems to be over.’

  As the others began walking away, Colt checked the padlock on Caruso’s cage. In the daylight, it looked even bigger and more solid than it had the night before. Solid as Fort Knox, Mr Busby had said – whatever that meant. Colt hurried to catch up with the girls.

  ‘Does your mum ever take Caruso out of his cage, Saffron?’

  She shook her head. ‘If he got out, nobody could catch him.’

  ‘So he never leaves his cage?’

  ‘Never.’

  Colt lightly touched the big, tender bruise on his forehead. Maybe I do need to see a doctor, he thought.

  When they arrived back at school, Captain Noah took one look at everyone and sent them running off to their caravans and motorhomes to change into dry clothes. He asked Colt to wait behind for a moment.

  ‘What did you think of Caruso, Master Lawless?’

  ‘He’s awesome.’

  Captain Noah smiled, then pointed at the whiteboard. The words ‘rat flu’ still shimmered in its holo-field. ‘That was quite a lesson you delivered earlier,’ he said. ‘I had no idea it all started in a laboratory.’

  ‘They kept it secret,’ said Colt. ‘If it got on the news, everyone would have lost their jobs. Including Mum.’

  ‘Then she wouldn’t have been able to develop RatVax,’ Captain Noah said.

  ‘I guess not.’

  ‘You must be proud of her.’

  Colt shrugged. His wet sneakers were making two dark circles on the carpet tiles. ‘She won’t be proud of me if she finds out I blabbed about it. I shouldn’t really have said anything.’

  His mother’s boss patted Colt gently on the shoulder. ‘I promise not to breathe a word of it.’

  ‘What about the others?’ Colt asked, waving a hand at the eight empty desks.

  ‘I’ll speak to them when they come back,’ Captain Noah said. ‘I’m sure they can keep a secret.’

  Colt’s mother wasn’t the only one who worked for Captain Noah. Colt had a circus job, too. He rode the elephant.

  Her name was Lucy. She was the last elephant in the world. Before Colt joined the circus, nobody was allowed on her. Captain Noah had strong ideas about how you should treat Lost World animals. He reckoned you shouldn’t ride them. But he’d changed his mind a few weeks ago when Colt and Birdy saved Lucy’s life.

  Now he paid Colt to ri
de her!

  Colt would have done it for nothing. Riding Lucy slowly around the circus ring while a huge crowd oohed, aahed and took holopics gave him the best feeling. At the end of each performance, when the ringmaster (Captain Noah) encouraged everyone to cheer, Colt felt like a rock star.

  But tonight was different. The wet weather had kept people away. There was hardly anybody in the stands. And hardly any applause as Colt and Lucy headed for the exit. It was disappointing. In the tunnel leading out of the giant tent, they passed Rasheed the juggler and his young assistant waiting to go in. The assistant gave him a small wave – it was Sangita from school – and Colt wished them good luck.

  Outside, the rain had finally stopped falling. The night air was muggy and warm. Colt decided not to take Lucy straight back to The Menagerie as he normally did. They would go for a walk instead. They weren’t supposed to, but there was nobody around. It would be good for Lucy to stretch her legs.

  This week the Big Top had been set up in a large paddock at the edge of a country town. There were houses on one side – many with lights showing in their windows – and a sea of pale nets on the other side. From high up on Lucy’s neck, Colt could see that the ghostly white netting stretched to the horizon. Hidden beneath it was a crop of some kind. Wheat probably, he thought. Today in class, Captain Noah had said this was a wheat town. Back in the Animal Days there’d been other farms here – sheep, cattle, even extinct alpacas – but now it was all crops. Colt kept Lucy well away from the fence. The nets were insect-proof, not elephant-proof, and she had a long trunk.

  ‘We’ll check out that tree over there,’ he said.

  It was on the far side of the paddock, invisible in the dark, but Colt had seen it in the daytime. Lucy liked trees. She went right in under it and reached her trunk up into the black ceiling of foliage above them.

  Colt should really have expected what happened next. Raindrops had been collecting on the leaves for the past day and a half. When Lucy snapped off a branch, she created a miniature rain storm.

  ‘Shashlik!’ cried Colt, shaking water out of his hair. ‘I only took you for a walk, Lucy, because the rain had stopped!’

  But the elephant didn’t seem to mind a bit of water falling on her. And she was enjoying her leafy supper so much that Colt just sat there, getting wetter every time she tore off another branch.

  Then Lucy paused. Her huge head was raised, her trunk was stretched up into the tree above them, but she wasn’t grabbing a fresh bunch of leaves.

  Colt heard her sniffing. ‘What is it, Luce?’ he asked. ‘Can you smell something?’

  It was silly how he talked to animals when he knew they could neither understand him nor answer him. He wondered if everyone used to do that back in the Animal Days, when people had cool pets like dogs and cats – not just lizards, insects and giant spiders, like they had now.

  Lucy made a deep rumbling noise. It was her way of talking. But it didn’t mean anything to Colt.

  Then he heard something that did mean something. High in the branches overhead, someone sneezed.

  ‘Who’s there?’ Colt asked, peering up into the dense black canopy above him.

  There was silence.

  ‘Is someone up there?’ he called, louder this time.

  Again, no answer. He must’ve imagined it. What would someone be doing way up a tree on a dark, wet night?

  Lucy rumbled again and shook her head, as if she’d been imagining things, too. She snapped off another branch, bringing down a fresh shower of raindrops.

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ Colt grumbled.

  Real raindrops had begun falling again by the time he released Lucy into her brand-new pen. It was made of railway sleepers fitted into steel frames that bolted together in a big rectangle. There was even a roof over one corner – that was Colt’s own idea. Before he and his mother joined the circus, Mr Busby used to chain Lucy to a big iron stake driven into the ground. Colt had persuaded Captain Noah to put a stop to that.

  ‘Lost World animals shouldn’t be chained up,’ he’d said, and the circus boss had looked embarrassed.

  ‘If I owned the circus,’ Colt told Lucy now, ‘there wouldn’t even be cages.’

  But that was a pretty silly idea, he realised as he hurried back to Circus City to change into something dry. What about the lions, the leopards, Puss (the panther)and the bears? And what about the monkeys and the apes – wouldn’t they just run off?

  Run off.

  Colt stopped dead in his tracks. Three seemingly unconnected memories – the conversation he’d had with Saffron; the empty cage; and the mysterious noise high in a tree – had suddenly joined together to give him one big idea.

  Caruso!

  Colt started running back in the direction of The Menagerie.

  The cage door was closed and locked. Colt pressed his face to the cold iron mesh, trying to see in. This time he didn’t have a torch.

  ‘Are you in there, Caruso?’ he asked.

  There were footsteps behind him. Colt turned quickly around. A dazzling light shone in his face. At first he thought it was Mr Busby, but it was a woman who spoke.

  ‘Well, if it isn’t my old friend Snowy!’

  Colt was blinded by her torch beam. But he knew who it was straightaway: Officer Katt from DoRFE, the Department of Rat Flu Eradication.

  She and Colt certainly weren’t friends.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked nervously.

  ‘My job. Looking for rats.’ The rat cop gave a cruel laugh. ‘And it looks like I’ve found one!’

  ‘Stop shining that thing in my eyes.’

  The light moved slowly downwards. ‘You’re soaking.’

  Colt shrugged. ‘That happens when it rains.’

  ‘Most people have the good sense to stay out of it,’ said Officer Katt, who was wearing an orange raincoat with a hood.

  ‘Is it any business of yours what I do?’ Colt asked.

  ‘As a matter of fact, yes, it is,’ said the rat cop. ‘The Department has a file on you and your mother. You are what we call Persons of Interest.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means we’re keeping an eye on you.’

  Colt knew why. A few weeks earlier, he, his mother and Birdy had prevented DoRFE from destroying Lucy when Officer Katt thought she had rat flu. Birdy was probably a person of interest, too.

  ‘You can spy on me all you like,’ he said. ‘I’m not doing anything wrong.’

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ said the rat cop. She shone her torch into the cage. ‘Who’s your friend?’

  Caruso was sitting innocently in his straw nest, blinking in the torchlight. Colt’s brainwave had been wrong.

  ‘Just a gibbon,’ he said.

  Officer Katt kept her torchlight trained on Caruso. ‘Well, it interests me, Snowy, why someone should be standing out here in the rain having a conversation with a sleeping monkey.’

  ‘I was just walking past.’

  ‘And yet you stopped for a little chat,’ the rat cop said thoughtfully. ‘I find that interesting.’

  ‘Your life must be pretty boring,’ Colt muttered.

  In the cage behind him, Caruso shielded his face from the dazzling light of Officer Katt’s torch.

  And sneezed.

  ‘You dragged us all out here in the rain because an ape sneezed?’ asked Colt’s mother.

  Six people were gathered under umbrellas outside Caruso’s cage: Kristin, Colt, Captain Noah, Mr Busby, Saffron’s mum and the rat cop.

  ‘I have reason to believe this animal might be infected with rat flu,’ Officer Katt said.

  ‘Because it sneezed?’ Kristin repeated. ‘Have you ever heard of the common cold, Officer Katt?’

  ‘He’s had one all week,’ said Saffron’s mother, whose name was Mrs Wells.

  The rat cop wasn’t listening. ‘Are its shots up to date?’

  ‘Caruso had his RatVax three weeks ago,’ Kristin said. ‘I can show you the records.’

 
; ‘I’ll need a copy,’ said the rat cop.

  Kristin looked annoyed, but she nodded. ‘Okay.’

  ‘And the Department will need to take a blood test.’

  ‘You’re joking!’

  ‘I’m not joking,’ the rat cop said. ‘We have to do a blood test. It’s standard procedure.’

  Colt could hardly believe it. This was exactly what had happened with Lucy. Except the elephant really did have rat flu. The DoRFE blood tests had confirmed it. The rat cops had been going to put her down, but he and Birdy had managed to get Lucy out of their clutches until a second round of tests had shown she was no longer infected and she was allowed back across the border.

  Officer Katt wasn’t going to let that happen again. She got Mrs Wells to remove the padlock from Caruso’s cage door and she replaced it with one of her own. The new padlock was painted orange and had the DoRFE logo (a white rat behind a big red X) on it.

  ‘Our vet will come tomorrow to take a blood sample,’ she said. ‘In the meantime, this cage is quarantined. Do you understand what that means, Snowy?’

  She was looking directly at Colt. Even in the darkness, her eyes had an evil glitter. She reminded him of a rat, which was kind of funny. He tried not to grin.

  ‘What’s the big joke?’ snarled the rat cop. She stabbed a finger at him. ‘You had a bit of luck last time, but I’m warning you – cross me again and you’ll be sorry!’

  Captain Noah had barely spoken until now. He had been dragged out of the Big Top in the middle of this evening’s performance and he was still wearing his ringmaster’s costume, which included a pair of white gloves. A white finger pointed at the rat cop. ‘Who do you think you are, Officer Katt, threatening a child?’

  The rat cop raised both hands, palms forward, as if she was backing down. But it was an act. ‘I was simply offering him – and all of you – a piece of friendly advice,’ she said in a voice that was anything but friendly. ‘This monkey is under quarantine.’

  ‘It’s an ape,’ Colt said, but Officer Katt ignored him.