Monkey and Me (2 page)

You know how sometimes you wake up in the morning and you don't know where you are? That happens to me quite a lot. I lie still and there's just me and the duvet in some kind of cloud formation floating in a Nowhere Zone. I can't hear anything. I'm not asleep but I'm not really awake either, so I drift along like a feather being bumped by the breeze. Then I know what it is I'm remembering. Dad's cab. There are 308,562 kilometres of roads in the UK, give or take the odd country lane, and Dad used to drive a monster articulated lorry everywhere there was a road big enough to drive down. All in all, with the trailer, it was an eighteen-wheeler, 13.6 metres long, three axles and six super singles; that's what you call the wheels because there's six of them and they're all singles. And the nice thing about the Scania Topliner was that it had two bunks behind the cab. The one above the driver's seat was for me.
That's where I used to snuggle when we went on those long journeys during school holidays and where Dad hid me when we went into the docks to unload, because it's illegal to take kids there – so I'd stay wedged behind the curtain. There was a fridge, microwave and a telly, it was heated, and if I'm honest I preferred being in there to being in my own room. I think with a bit more time I could have driven it myself, though the sixteen gears might have taken a bit of getting used to. I've eaten Dundee cake in Dundee and scones and cream in Devon, and I've scoffed fish and chips in Whitby, but didn't fancy the jellied eels in east London. That's called discretion. Or, as Mark says, that's me being chicken. But I don't eat chicken any more either since I saw on the telly how thousands of them are crammed into sheds. That's horrible. That's cheap food, says Mark. That's like a concentration camp, Dad says and Mum now has to buy cowboy chickens, which is what Dad calls them because they are free-range. I still don't eat them. So, that's the feeling I have lying under my duvet – rocking gently along, to the purring of Dad's big diesel engine, swaying me gently beneath the duvet in the sleeping cab behind him.

But I don't go with him any more. He gave up being a long-distance lorry driver because he said he wanted to be closer to home, what with Mum working shifts at the supermarket and everything. I miss the cab, but I'm glad he's home. So's Mum. I think it's the hospital thing again.

Sometimes, on my way home, I watch him (when he's on a double round) pushing that big trolley with the huge red Royal Mail bag strapped to it. He's not that young any more and I wish I could think of something to get him back on the road with McKinley's Transport Company Limited, so he could sit in his nice heated cab with the pneumatic seat, his power steering and the comfy bunk in the back of the cab with the little telly set up. Maybe I could get Mark's gang to steal his postman's trolley, then he'd get sacked. But losing the Royal Mail is a pretty serious offence, and how cross would the Queen be if all the postcards of Windsor Castle she sent everyone never got delivered? It might be better to sneak out at night and seal up all the letter boxes, then he couldn't deliver any mail. If I wrote to everyone I know I could ask them never to write to anyone ever again, that might make his load lighter;
but the trouble with that idea is that he would have to deliver the letters that I've written. I'll have to think about this again.

My brain often jumbles loads of thoughts together. I can hear Feather barking down the street and Mrs Tomkinson shouting, “Shut that flaming dog up!” Light creeps around and through the curtains (they're not very thick: X-Men prints, seventy per cent cotton, thirty per cent poly-something – the label's worn away – made in China).

Mum's shouting for Mark and me to get up. In the half-light I see Steven Gerrard's poster on the wall, leg extended, striking the ball. Michael Owen (who was arguably the world's best ever player for Liverpool – before Steven Gerrard, that is) doesn't play for Liverpool any more. Even though he left home, and went to play for another club – whose name shall not be mentioned (says Dad) – he's still here, in our hearts (says Dad). He never really went away. You don't. It's where you belong. That's called Emotional Ties.

Then I have to pee.

This was a capital letter day. It was a BIG day.
When countries declare war they have special meetings in the War Room. Skimp and Rocky were sitting on the wall during break. Mark was kicking his ball, concentrating hard, though not on the kicking – he just does that on automatic – but on what Skimp had just told him.

“It's being pulled down.”

“What is?” I asked.

“Clear off, Jez,” Mark said, “this is an EMEC – an Extraordinary Meeting of the Executive Council.”

“About what?”

“They're demolishing Sweet Dreams,” said Pete-the-Feet.

“Shut up, you! EMECs are secret!” Mark hit him on the head with the ball.

“Well, it's not a secret now,” Rocky said, retrieving it.

“Beanie's on the council anyway,” Skimp told them. “He's already been voted into the gang, so how can we keep him out?”

They all looked at Mark and he looked at me. He must have realised that the process of democratic decision-making sometimes overrules nepotism.

“All right. Look, we've got to find a new
headquarters,” Mark told us. I could see he was back in command again.

“Why can't we keep the factory?” I asked.

They look at me as if I was deaf, like that Tracy Lewis who lives across the other side of the estate and goes to a special school. “I mean, they can't knock it down all at once. There must be a bit of it we can use.”

“You're not allowed to make suggestions, Beanie. You're still on probation,” Rocky said. “Besides, we could get trapped underground and end up like Hitler in his bunker.”

I didn't think Hitler was ever at the Sweet Dreams Sweet Factory, but I didn't say anything.

“We could always have a protest,” Pete-the-Feet suggested. “Y'know, link arms, ‘We shall not be moved,' and all that. I mean, perhaps Sweet Dreams might even be some kind of Victorian heritage building. We could tell everyone it's important to the nation.”

“After we've smashed all the windows, I don't think so,” said Skimp.

“There's one window left,” I told them. “The fourth floor, top right.”

“So what? There won't be any floors left after today,” Rocky moaned.

Then the bell went. Obviously we were in some kind of crisis. The gang's secret hideout was about to be demolished. “Dad says we must never give up without a fight,” I shouted at them as they walked back.

“You can't fight bulldozers, Beanie. Get real,” Rocky said.

I stood there watching everyone go back into school. You can't get real. It's not something you can touch or smell. It's something else. It's called a figure of speech. But being real is different – that's being yourself. At least that's what Dad says. And I know who I am. I'm Jez Matthews, I'm nine years, eleven months and eight days old.

And, as Dad keeps telling me, if you don't try, you don't get. He never finishes that sentence – but I think I know what he means. You can't give up without a fight.

It was sports afternoon, and circumstances meant I was excused. ‘Circumstances' is a word I never knew much about – I didn't have to because I never
really had any. Circumstances, that is. But now I hear it a lot. Dad gave up his lorry-driving because of circumstances, Mum works shifts at the supermarket because of circumstances and I don't play football because of circumstances. Thirteen is an unlucky number and there are thirteen letters in that word – and it seems to me that circumstances are never really that good. So on sports day my circumstances allow me to run home and sneak into Dad's shed.

He's brilliant at everything. He was a very careful long-distance lorry driver and he's a well-liked postie who keeps an eye on elderly people when he delivers mail. He might be brilliant at everything he does, but no one's told him that he's not so brilliant at DIY. In fact he's rubbish, that's the truth. When he tried to decorate the house last year we had more wallpaper left over than the Dead Sea Scrolls, or so Mum said.

And another thing: Dad never throws anything out. You never know when you might need something again, he always tells Mum. Then she insists he puts whatever it is in the shed. Where no one goes except him. And me.

I had to tell the world about Sweet Dreams Sweet
Factory and thanks to Dad's hoarding and all those rolls of wallpaper I had everything I needed. I was going to make a banner big enough to be seen from space, though I doubted that anyone up there in the international space station would be looking down just at the right time.

It took me a while to saw the broom handle in half with Dad's small handsaw and then tack each end of the wallpaper roll onto the two halves. Then I needed a long corridor to unroll my banner. And Dad's shed isn't even big enough to swing a cat in – or so he says – so I took it in the house and unrolled it in the hall. I got marker pen ink on me, the walls and Mum's beige carpet. She wouldn't be pleased if she noticed, and it would be hard to miss because where I'd gone over the edge of the paper looked like crows' feet had walked in ink and staggered up the hall. But once she knew I'd done exactly what Dad had always told me, then I doubted that she'd throw a wobbly.

He's always said we have to be brave. I don't know why, because we don't have rampaging elephants coming down the street, there are no cobras in the garden and the nearest motorway is miles away.
As long as you can outrun Peacock's Feather there's nothing really to worry about around here. I think maybe he meant school and the other kids. But I'm not sure. He never said. And when I asked him why I had to be brave he didn't seem too sure, but then said we shouldn't be scared.

I didn't know I was.

So, everything was going to plan until I got to the top floor of Sweet Dreams Sweet Factory. Some of the big earth-moving machines were at the back of the building and there was brick dust everywhere. Every time one of the JCBs whacked the building with its mutant-crab-like arm, the whole place shuddered. The stairwells were still okay and luckily the breeze came through all those windows we'd broken and blew fresh air inside, which stopped the dust from choking me. I think my timing was a bit out. I didn't think my protest was going to save the building.

I got to the edge and climbed out onto the old fire-escape. Then I unfurled the wallpaper roll for the whole world to see. It dangled like a banner from a high-street shop when they have a sale, but my banner didn't say ‘Everything Must Go 50%
Off'; mine said ‘SAVE SWEET DREAMS SWEET FACTOR'.

Sometimes when I write an essay I run out of space on the edge of the page and I have to break the word up and carry on the next line. Well, I ran out of space with my banner. I couldn't fit the Y in. But I didn't have another line to go on. So people are either going to think I can't spell or won't know what Factor it is we should be trying to save. Some might be bright enough to know I ran out of paper.

I waited an hour but no one turned up to see my protest and it'd gone very quiet. I thought the demolition men had gone home. And the fire escape felt wonky. It creaked and groaned and I noticed it was quite rusty. I thought I might be too heavy for such an old bit of iron. My banner was flapping a bit as the wind picked up and I tried to climb back into the building. But as I put my feet on the railing it came away from the wall. Not much. But enough. It was a gap big enough to fit my lunch box in, between the wall and railing. I got this sudden lurch in my stomach and I caught my breath, because if it came away from the wall any more I was going to have a problem. Like falling.

I must have been really clumsy and left too many clues at home, because I saw Mark and Dad arrive in the car and Mark was already pointing up.

“Jez! Stay there, son! Don't move!” Dad shouted.

I waved, but the iron fire escape wobbled. I held on and had to grip the railing tighter because my knees were trembling and all of a sudden it seemed a long way down to where Mark stood alone looking up at me.

“You idiot! You absolute moron!” he shouted by way of making me feel better and to disguise his true feelings of concern for me.

Then, all of a sudden, there was a crowd of people and kids, standing on the other side of the fence. Maybe they'd come to offer their support to save the factory. And right over there, coming down Jessup Road, was a police car with its lights flashing. I'm not so sure they were there for crowd control.

Then I went all wobbly. That's happened before once in a while, but just then was not a good time to faint. I gripped the old iron tighter. My nose was running, but I couldn't let go to wipe it. Then I found it was bleeding. Dad calls it a Bloody Nuisance Nose – it happens now and again.

Then I saw Dad. He popped his head through a broken window. He smiled and rolled his eyes. He always sees the funny side of things. Dad's a lot of fun. Sometimes when we're all out together he embarrasses Mum. There we are walking down the shopping mall and suddenly he jumps in front of us, opens up his big hands and stops us dead in our tracks.