Monkey and Me (11 page)

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 hospital. 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 feeling 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.”

He nodded.

“And give him some breakfast. Coco Pops or something. And toast.”

I showed Malcolm the palm of my hand held up. I hoped he would understand that I wanted him to stay here. Then I put a finger to my lips again.
He just sat down and looked at me. Talking with your hands is really difficult, so all I could do was touch my chest and my lips to show him I loved him.

Then I gave him my Rubik's cube to play with.

They make a real effort at our hospital to help sick children feel as comfortable as possible. That's what they told me when I first went there. The being comfortable bit wasn't exactly true because of the treatment, but you get used to it and now when I lie on the bed I look at all the different colours they painted the walls.

Apparently, the combination of the colours orange and blue has a calming effect and the room I was in had these two colours going around it with quite jolly paintings of cartoon characters. It feels a bit like being in the middle of
Toy Story
or
Shrek
. I prefer to have Mum wait outside because it can't be very pleasant for her seeing me get treatment. And besides, sometimes I can't help it and I cry, just a bit, and I don't want her seeing that. I sometimes feel a bit sorry for myself, but then I think of Dad pushing that huge trolley full of letters and I have to tell myself that I'm very lucky that I don't have to do that as well.

Dr Mansfield had a new trainee doctor with her. At least I think he was a trainee, because he watched what she did very carefully. She let him have a go and he seemed to be all right. His name was Dr Morgan, but he says I can call him Rick. I tell him he can call me Beanie. It's probably better to be a bit personal when someone's sticking needles into you.

Dr Mansfield is a nice lady doctor and she is the one who looks after me when I go for my treatment.

“Are you all right, Beanie?” she asked me. “You seem a bit unhappy today. Not that being here is anything to be pleased about, is it?”

“I'm all right. Did you hear about me trying to save the Sweet Dreams Sweet Factory?”

“I didn't, no. Why does it need saving?”

“Mum used to work there and I haven't had any Tube Sucks since they closed down. It was also going to be a secret headquarters for the gang I'm in.”

“That's very interesting,” she said. But it wasn't, not to her; she was just being polite as she fiddled with the equipment and checked my chart, while Rick took my pulse with one of those little clothes-peg thermometers that you stick on the end of your finger. Then he put another thermometer in my ear.

“Nothing in there that I can see,” he said and grinned.

“Are you saying I've got no brain?” I said with a straight face.

He looked as though he'd sat on one of his own needles. “No, no… I was just…”

I laughed. And he knew I was teasing. That's the trouble these days, you can't say anything that might offend anyone, even if you're just kidding. Dad says that if you can't have fun poked at you then you're going to grow up a really miserable so-and-so. Anyway, it was an old joke. Dad did one much better when I had an ear infection. He looked in with his big torch and blew in my ear. The next thing I knew there was a feather in my other ear. “Head full of feathers,” he said. I still don't know how he got the feather in there.

“Your temperature's up a bit,” Rick said. He picked my beanie up off the chair and looked at it. “This must keep the heat in, like a tea cosy on a teapot.”

And of course that made me think even more about Malcolm. I was really worried that they weren't going to get him into the caravan and that the
police and the RSPCA were going to catch him.

Dr Mansfield watched me and I could see she knew something was bothering me – and it wasn't just the Sweet Dreams Sweet Factory. That's called perception.

I had to tell them something otherwise they would scribble notes on that clipboard about me being upset, or that the treatment wasn't working properly, or that they were going to give me something else, or that…

“I was doing a school project on chimpanzees,” I told them. “Did you know there's only two per cent difference in the genes between them and us?”

“I did know that, actually,” Dr Mansfield said. “They're what's called sentient beings.”

That was a new word I hadn't heard before, but it sounded quite important in relation to Malcolm. “What does that mean?”

“Well, it means they have a consciousness, like you and me. They can experience emotions,” she said.

“Like being frightened?” I asked her.

“Oh yes. Many animals can sense and experience fear.”

“And what about feelings? I mean, could they
feel the same as I do about Mum and Dad?”

“Yes, I believe so. Primates are raised in family groups.”

“So they'd miss
their
mum and dad if they were separated from them?”

“I suppose they would.”

“And they would need someone else to love them and look after them? Because otherwise they could just be sad and lonely.”

“I suppose so.”

I was feeling sick by now, though that's not unusual when I come for treatment, but I think this was like before, when I thought of Malcolm being alone and scared. Whatever feelings I had for him must be pretty big on the sentient scale of things.

“So it's pretty horrible when you think that people capture chimpanzees and other monkeys and put them in cages and then take them into laboratories and do tests on them. If someone did that to me I'd be terrified. It's bad enough coming in here for treatment, where people are nice to me and explain things about what they're going to do. It's not very pleasant and it hurts sometimes, but at least I understand.”

“Is that what you've read in your project?”

I nodded.

“Well,” she said very gently, “not all experiments and research are done on animals these days. Scientists often use live tissue culture instead.”

Dr Rick was doing something to the monitor screen that showed the levels of stuff they were putting into me and said, “Yes, but if it wasn't for animal experiments there'd be no cancer research, no nothing research. You try telling someone really sick that they can't get cured because someone doesn't want to test a new drug on an animal.”

Sometimes you can see what people are thinking when you look at their face. Dr Mansfield's expression didn't change that much, but there was a sort of different light in her eyes.

“I don't think this is the place to discuss that, do you?” she said.

Dr Rick shrugged, and started to say: “Look, all I'm saying is that if there are no experiments…” He stopped because he realised Dr Mansfield must have been warning him with that look. He glanced at me, and then lowered his eyes. I could tell he was embarrassed. “I'd better just go and check some
stuff outside,” he said and left the room.

I think Dr Mansfield would like to have said a lot more. I think she was kind enough that she would have wanted to tell me that someone like Malcolm had not been harmed in order for me to get better. But she just gave one of those encouraging smiles and made sure the tube was taped properly to my arm. “There,” she said, “won't be long now. You'll soon be home.”

It couldn't be soon enough. I knew now more than ever that I had to save Malcolm from getting hurt.

Dad always comes to the hospital and he's the one who thinks of a joke afterwards. Mum laughs too, but she doesn't do the cracking-up laugh that Dad gets before he even finishes the joke. It drives everyone crazy. He's almost there, almost at the end of the joke and he's in fits. He laughs so much that I always start laughing with him. The tears roll down his face and I'm creased up because I can't help it. He's snorting like a donkey, Mum is trying to drive and I'm screaming for him to tell me the end of the joke. When he eventually gets there it's usually a rubbish joke. I don't know what he thought was so
funny to start with – but you have to laugh.

I usually lie flat out on the sofa after I've had my treatment. I feel rotten – but not as rubbish I'd feel if Dad hadn't done his daft act. Sometimes I throw up, sometimes I don't.

“Jez? Use the downstairs loo,” Mum called after me.

“No, I'm all right!” I shouted back as I went upstairs. I felt awful, and I knew I was going to puke sooner or later, but I had to see if Malcolm was still in the house. My room looked as though a hurricane had hit it.

Mark was sitting in front of the wardrobe and put a finger to his lips.

“What?” I whispered.

“We couldn't get Malcolm to come with us to the caravan. He went bananas. I managed to corner him and get him into the wardrobe,” Mark said.

“You've trapped him? He'll be terrified,” I told him as I got down on my hands and knees and pulled him out the way.

Mark grabbed hold of me. “Listen, if he'd have got out the room he would have been gone for ever. I had to get him in there.”

I squeezed the door open a bit and put my face in the crack. “Whoo whoo,” I whispered. “Malcolm, it's me – Beanie. Don't be frightened.”

A hairy finger came out the wardrobe and touched my nose. The door burst open and Mark and me fell backwards. Malcolm was all over me, screeching and howling.

“Shut him up!” Mark hissed.

I tried. But you know how it is when you have an excited chimpanzee running around your room.

When you're sick and go to our hospital they always give you a handful of sweets to suck. I pulled a lollipop out and gave it to Malcolm. The quickest way to keep a child quiet is to give it a sweet. I've heard Mum's friend, Mrs Wallace, tell her that, and she should know – she's got four – but Mum doesn't agree with that, I've heard her say it's too much sugar. I think Mum is wrong. Malcolm sucked the sweet like it was the last thing he'd ever eat.

I was just about to pick him up and put him back into bed when the doorbell rang.

Mark and I froze. No one comes to our house during the day except the man to read the electricity
meter and he was here last week. There were muffled voices downstairs.

“Jez? Are you all right, love?” Mum called.

Mark nodded furiously. “Tell her you're OK, otherwise she'll be up here looking for you.”

I shouted back. “I'm fine, Mum, I'm just looking for something in my room.”

“Then can you come down a minute?”

Mark and I looked at each other. Who was at the door? Mark climbed up onto the bunk bed and looked out the window. “It's the police. Maybe they interrogated Tracy. She must have told them about Malcolm,” Mark said.

“No, she'd never have done that. She wants to be in the gang. She would have just stood there and used sign language. And how many people can understand that? Only Malcolm – that's how clever he is.”

“You'd better go,” Mark said.

I stroked Malcolm's face and whispered to him, then put my finger to my lips. He had the lollipop in his cheek and the stick poking through his grinning teeth.

“You have to be quiet,” I tell him.

He copies me, putting a finger to his pouting lips.

I place the other sweets in the wardrobe and he follows them.

“He'll be quiet for a bit, but watch him. Don't let him choke,” I told Mark.

“What do I do if he does?”

“I don't know… try mouth-to-mouth.”

Mum was whispering. The two policemen were in the doorway. I could just hear what she was saying: “We've just come back from the hospital.”

I stopped halfway down the stairs and listened. The policeman looked at each other. “If he's sick, we really need to know about it. We know he's been at the Black Gate house because sniffer dogs found his trail. And there's a monkey on the loose which we think might be sick.”

“Monkeys? Around here? Don't be daft,” Mum said.

I was right! Malcolm must have escaped from a laboratory. Maybe they'd given him the plague or something. Being with us must have helped him. He certainly wasn't off his food.

Mum lowered her voice, like she always does,
when she tells people about me. The cops looked uncomfortable. I had to go downstairs and talk to them otherwise they might start searching the house and then they would definitely find Malcolm.

“Jez, love, these policemen need to ask you a couple of questions. Are you feeling well enough?”