Monkey Come Home Read online

  Then the screen went black.

  These words scrolled up:

  Congratulations! You are the 879th intrepid explorer to return from the Outer Extremity. Please record your name for posterity in the Pan Universal Heroes’ Hall of Glory.

  Serenity and I looked at each other, flabbergasted. I was speechless, not daring to imagine what would happen next and wondering what the word ‘posterity’ meant. Green numbers appeared on the screen, counting down from 30. But the monkey did nothing. Maybe he didn’t have a name. When the numbers got down to 20 they turned orange. The monkey still didn’t make a move. He had understood what I’d said earlier, but maybe he couldn’t read. Somehow he’d conquered the game in just two hours. Now he was frozen.

  Loud beeping started when the counter hit 10 and the numbers flashed red. 9…8…7…The monkey looked around the room. 6…5…He turned back to the monitor and reached for the keyboard. 4…3… And then, with two seconds left, he finally tapped in the name:

  E-A-R-L

  Body Odour

  ‘What would you like for breakfast, Sleeping Beauty?’ Mum asked as I dug the crusty bits from the corners of my eyes.

  ‘Eggs on toast,’ I said.

  ‘No eggs, sorry.’

  ‘Just toast then.’

  ‘Too late. We’ve run out of bread.’

  ‘Why did you ask me what I wanted then?’ I snapped.

  ‘Ooh…It seems like Mr Grumpy got out of the wrong side of the bed this morning.’

  Mr Grumpy had slept on the floor. Last night I’d been so impressed by the monkey’s ability to use the computer, that I expected him to be able to answer some of my burning questions. I wanted to know where he came from and how he got here, for starters. But he wouldn’t pay attention to me and thought it was funny to bang all of the computer keys at once, making a meaningless string of letters that looked like this:

  saveninapurl-optionxearl-orciapronto

  Unless there was someone called Nina Purl, who needed to be rescued, the words didn’t make much sense. I fired more questions at the monkey but he wouldn’t touch the keyboard again. Perhaps it had been a coincidence that he had managed to spell the name Earl in the first place.

  I went to sleep after midnight with the monkey at the foot of my bed. Elsie Birkett marched into my first dream dressed in a kilt and playing the bagpipes. As if that wasn’t scary enough, it was followed by a nightmare about my toy monkey — Earl. He was walking down a long path with a suitcase and I was running after him but my legs were like concrete. Somehow I finally reached him and tapped his shoulder. He turned around slowly, transforming into the real monkey, and bit my nose. I woke in a clammy sweat to find the real monkey had moved right up onto my pillow and was only two centimetres from my face. The floor seemed preferable to a mouthful of monkey hair, so I relocated.

  Mum brought me a big bowl of cereal and gave me a hug. Then she started sniffing me.

  ‘Oh, pong, Avery!’ She recoiled. ‘What’s that smell?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You smell a wee bit strange, a wee bit…I don’t know…’

  ‘Feral?’ Serenity suggested as she came into the kitchen.

  ‘Exactly!’ Mum said. ‘You smell like an animal. What on Earth have you been doing?’

  ‘Nothing.’ I sniffed myself, twice.

  ‘It’s his own rank body odour,’ Serenity chimed in. ‘And they say that a dog can’t smell its own scent.’

  ‘Well don’t worry, darling. It’s just one of the delightful mysteries of growing up,’ Mum said. ‘Just make sure you ask your father to buy you some deodorant when you go shopping. Who knows? Next week you might be shaving.’

  Bathmilk

  ‘Don’t forget the pssh pssh.’ Mum mimed the action of spraying under her arm when she got out of the car. Dad and I dropped her off at tennis on our way to the mall. It was cool to be having a ‘boys only’ morning with him, though I was worried about leaving Earl with Serenity. Sometimes Dad could take hours shopping, especially if he bumped into someone he knew and got talking to them. This particular Saturday morning, it turned out to be the beachcomber, Sam Hurley who Dad spotted in the checkout queue.

  ‘How are your choppers?’ He asked Sam, who had probably never visited a dentist in his life.

  ‘Still there,’ Sam said. ‘The old knee’s been giving me all sorts of grief, but I wouldn’t be dead for quids on a morning like this.’

  ‘Have you found any good stuff this week?’ I piped up.

  ‘Funny you should ask, young Avery. Just yesterday, I was scanning the beach up near the bombora and my old metal detector just about went berserk.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘I couldn’t tell you. It was too far down. But it must’ve been big to set off a signal. I started digging but the back gave in before I reached it. I’ll be on the job again tomorrow, though.’

  ‘Can I come and help?’

  ‘If it’s okay with your dad.’

  ‘Sure,’ Dad said. ‘You can help old Bluebeard dig up his buried treasure.’

  ‘Yo ho ho! Ye never know what me and m’hearty will discover. Meet me when the clock strikes two, Avery Bloom. And don’t forget to bring ye a spade.’ Sam’s pirate act was kind of funny, except when a bit of spit hit me square in the eye.

  Dad dropped me, and five bags of groceries, back home and went to join Mum at tennis. I thought it was a good opportunity to take Earl outside to climb some trees or do whatever it is that monkeys like to do. I left the shopping unpacked in the kitchen and went upstairs. As I approached Serenity’s door, I could hear her talking.

  ‘That’s just what you needed, isn’t it? A good scrub down followed by a nice long soak in my luxury bathmilk. You look absolutely adorable now. But just wait till we finish your hair and hide those funny lumps on your head.’

  I pushed open the door and was mortified to see that Serenity had dressed Earl in one of her old baby doll dresses and was tying a pink ribbon to his hair.

  ‘What have you done?’ I cried.

  ‘I gave Earl a bath so that he wouldn’t be smelly and now we’re playing dress-ups.’

  ‘Earl is not a girl!’

  ‘So what? Everybody loves a little pampering.’

  ‘But Earl is a monkey! I shouted. ‘Not a person. You said it yourself.’

  ‘Correct,’ she replied calmly. ‘And grooming is a friendly thing that monkeys do. Remember?’

  Beachcomber

  Sam Hurley says he knows a little about a lot of things and a lot about One Pebble Bay. But he doesn’t spread those things around, unlike Elsie Birkett. I knew he could keep the secret about Earl and thought he might be able to help me figure out what to do with him. Sam was already digging when I arrived with my spade.

  ‘Two o’clock right on the dot,’ he said. ‘That’s a serious looking backpack you’ve got there. Thinking of camping the night?’

  ‘No. I brought a friend with me.’ I took off the pack and unzipped it. ‘This is Earl.’ Earl scrambled out. He made a ‘tsk tsk’ sound and wagged his finger at me, mimicking what I’d done when he pulled Serenity’s hair. Obviously he didn’t like being confined in small spaces.

  ‘Haw haw,’ Sam chuckled. ‘What a little beauty! Where did he come from?’

  ‘I was hoping you might be able to tell me that.’ Earl climbed onto Sam’s back and scratched behind his ear.

  ‘Haw haw haw! Cheeky little thing. He’s a rhesus macaque. You find them in Afghanistan, India and southern China. Macaque’s are good swimmers, but not that good. I’d guess he was born in captivity.’

  I told Sam how I’d found Earl and all about the computer incident. He seemed impressed but thought it would be illegal for me to keep Earl and insisted that I tell Mum and Dad. I was severely disappointed because I knew Sam was right.

  ‘I’ll do it soon, but I want to know how he got here first,’ I said.

  ‘Sometimes, Avery, you’ll find the answers to your questions only when yo
u stop looking for them. But that’s enough gabbing for now. Let’s get to work.’

  Sam and I began digging with the spades and Earl joined in by scooping with his hands and flicking the sand behind him. Each of his loads was small, but he was working five times faster than us. Soon we had dug to where the sand was moist and I found myself in a hole that was above my waist.

  ‘Are you sure there’s something down here?’ I said.

  ‘I’d bet my shirt on it. Watch this.’ Sam fetched his metal detector and swept it around the edge of the hole and it made a steady whine. But when he put it directly over the hole it went ballistic. The deafening high-frequency squeal it made was unbearable. Earl looked like he’d been hit with a stun gun.

  ‘Okay! We get your point!’ I shouted.

  ‘We’re almost there,’ Sam said as he climbed back into the hole. ‘Twenty more digs each and then we’ll call it quits.’

  ‘Deal.’ I began digging like a machine and counting down the strokes. On nine there was a clang; a painful jolt shot through my arm and into my shoulder and back.

  ‘Aha!’ Sam cried. ‘You’ve hit pay dirt! Hands only now.’

  The three of us brushed sand away from the object, like archaeologists, and gradually revealed what looked like some sort of cone with ‘PUX7’ painted on the side. Without warning, Sam lifted me up and threw me out of the hole, then clambered out after me. ‘It could be dangerous,’ he puffed. ‘Stay back!’

  ‘But Earl’s still in there!’ I cried.

  ‘Stay away from that hole!’ Sam said, holding onto my shoulders. I called out to Earl, but he wouldn’t come out. So I broke free from Sam’s grip and ran back to the hole. I peered over the edge and saw Earl opening a small hatch on the side of the cone.

  ‘You’re not going to believe this,’ I called to Sam. ‘But he’s climbing into that thing.’

  ‘Heaven’s above,’ Sam muttered, as he approached the edge. ‘It’s inconceivable.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This could be it, Avery.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I was out fishing on Thursday night and saw a blazing light over the sea. It was like fire falling from the sky. I didn’t know whether I’d seen a meteorite or I was losing my marbles. Yesterday, at the post office, I overheard Elsie Birkett talking about seeing the same thing. Avery, I think this is what we both saw that night!

  ‘What is it, Sam? A piece of space junk?’

  ‘Not junk, Avery. I have a feeling that this is how your monkey arrived in One Pebble Bay.’

  Brainiac

  ‘Barry!’ Mum called out from the hallway. ‘If you insist on taking baths when we’re still in a drought, then the least you can do is remove your hair from the drain afterwards. Look at that!’ She held up a wad of hair in her rubber gloved fingers, as if it was a contagious specimen.

  ‘Sorry to disappoint you, Honey, but I haven’t had a bath for months,’ Dad said.

  ‘Don’t look at me,’ Serenity said. ‘That is so not even close to my hair colour.’

  Mum came and stood between me and the TV and bent down so that her nose was almost touching mine. ‘Avery, please tell me that you haven’t started sprouting body hair.’

  ‘Eww,’ Serenity scrunched up her face. ‘That is so utterly disgusting.’

  ‘Not half as disgusting as the grimy ring that the invisible man left around the bathtub.’

  ‘It was probably your mystery visitor from last night,’ Dad said. ‘Now can we have some shoosh to watch the news?’

  ‘Don’t you shoosh me!’ Mum said. ‘There’s something fishy going on around here and I don’t like it one little bit.’

  ‘April, please give it a rest.’ Dad turned up the volume with the remote so that the newsreader was practically shouting. An image of an old-style rocket ship appeared behind the announcer’s head.

  ‘Thousands of reports have flooded in from residents along the Central and North Coast of fiery lights over the Pacific Ocean on Thursday night. Top astronomers from the International Space Monitoring Organisation believe residents were witnessing the return to Earth of a rocket’s nose cone that was launched into space more than thirty years ago. The cone was unmanned and is thought to have burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere before it could splash down into the sea. The long forgotten mission was one of ten launched by the Pan Universal Exploration Corporation. PUXCorp were researching the possibility of establishing mining colonies in outer space.’

  ‘Crazy stuff!’ Dad said and muted the newsreader so that he could have our full attention. ‘Elsie Birkett saw that thing on Thursday night.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about Elsie Birkett and crazy stuff,’ Mum said. ‘This afternoon she was carrying on about some wild creature stealing vegetables from her garden. Can you believe that woman? Then she had the audacity to suggest that Avery was somehow involved.’

  My face burned. I held up my hands and mumbled something stupid.

  ‘Don’t worry, darling,’ Mum said. ‘I know that you don’t like cauliflower. Now, Barry, please come upstairs and get ready. I really don’t want to be late for the Vandermeers again.’

  While Mum and Dad were getting dressed for dinner, I told Serenity about the discovery that Sam and I had made earlier.

  ‘Whoa…This is all getting way too freaky,’ she said. ‘We seriously need to tell someone.’

  ‘No, we can’t. Sam and I reburied the cone. He said One Pebble would be ruined forever if the world found out the cone splashed down here. Can you imagine if they found out that it was guided back to Earth by a brainiac monkey called Earl? There would be thousands and thousands of people swarming our town and TV cameras everywhere.’

  ‘Yes!’ Serenity’s face looked like it had been plugged into a power point. ‘Yes, you’re right! And instead of being on the outer extremity, One Pebble Bay will be at the centre of the universe. Everyone will want the story, Avery. We’ll sell it to the highest bidder, of course. I’m guessing millions. We’ll be outrageously rich and famous. Think of it. Me and Earl could be the new Paris and Babyluv. And there’ll be a movie for sure. Who would you get to play you? I bags playing myself.’

  ‘Has anybody seen my earrings?’ Mum shouted from upstairs.

  Bumps

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, step right up to see Barry Blooming Stupendous perform amazing culinary feats with freshly laid hens’ eggs. He can poach ’em. He can fry ’em. He can even scramble. Do I have any takers?

  ‘Two fried please?’ I said.

  ‘Ready in a flash. And what about you little Missy?’

  ‘I’ll have Eggs Benedict.’

  ‘Sorry. No can do. You’ll have to wait for my lovely assistant, Miss April.’

  ‘Where is Mum?’ I asked

  ‘Upstairs,’ Dad said. ‘She’s looking for those earrings she couldn’t find last night.’

  ‘Oh, do you mean the tacky fake diamond ones?’ Serenity asked.

  ‘Yes. They’re called cubic zirconias and they were the first present I gave your mother when we started going out.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Serenity shrugged. ‘Haven’t seen them.’ Dad cracked two eggs into the frying pan, which was already sizzling with butter and onions.

  ‘Mmm, that smells great,’ Mum said, as she entered the kitchen.

  ‘Any luck?’ Dad asked.

  ‘No. They’ve either vanished or fallen down the drain.’

  ‘Impossible. They’re way too chunky. But don’t worry about it, we’ll get you another pair.’

  ‘It just wouldn’t be the same,’ Mum said.

  ‘I know,’ Dad hugged her. ‘What the…?’ He sputtered as he looked over Mum’s shoulder.

  ‘Uh oh,’ said Serenity. ‘It looks like the gig is up.’

  Earl had walked into the room flaunting the missing earrings on his earlobes. He sure timed his appearance for maximum impact.

  ‘Oh my giddy aunt! A monkey! My earrings! What on Earth is going on here?’ Mum shook her hea
d in disbelief.

  ‘Well I suppose that once I gave him a taste for wearing women’s clothing, he just couldn’t get enough,’ Serenity said.

  ‘Great accessorising,’ added Dad.

  ‘Enough! Why is there a monkey in our house?’

  ‘Umm…This is the wild animal that Mrs Birkett was talking about,’ I said. ‘But as you can see, he’s not really that wild.’ I bent down to whisper in Earl’s ear,’ Give the earrings back to Mum.’

  Mum squealed when he climbed up her leg. Serenity said, ‘From personal experience I’d advise you to stay calm.’ Earl carefully clipped the jewellery onto Mum’s earlobes and came back to me.

  ‘I’ve seen that trick somewhere before,’ Dad said. ‘Where is he from?’

  ‘Now that is the really cool part,’ Serenity said. ‘Tell them, Avery.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mum said, still visibly shaken. ‘Do tell.’

  I gave them a brief version of the events of the past three days and told them that Sam and I believed Earl had been in the rocket that we’d seen on the news. Dad looked sceptical.

  ‘Okay. You and Sam might have found an unusual chunk of metal in the sand. And your monkey does seem very intelligent. But I find it hard to believe that he was up in space. For starters, they said that the nose cone was unmanned.’

  ‘He’s a monkey,’ I said. ‘And Sam and I saw Earl’s little compartment in the cone with our own eyes.

  ‘Earl?’ Dad said. ‘Did you name him after your toy?’

  ‘No, he typed out his name on my computer. And look at what else he wrote.’ I pulled out the sheet of paper I’d recorded the letters on.