Monkey Business (2 page)

Mum parped the horn as a car pulled out of a side road right in front of her. She muttered something that Felix couldn’t hear properly.

‘Mum?’ he said, more loudly.

‘Yes, dear,’ she said through gritted teeth. ‘I’m sure the teachers would love that.’

‘Well, it would be more exciting than just having Jeff,’ Felix went on.

Jeff was kind of a school pet. He was the class mouse in actual fact. But he was a pretty useless sort of pet as he never did anything. Even Hammer did stuff, like put things in his pouches and
build nests and sometimes escape. And the thing with Jeff was you were only allowed to play with him when it was your turn to clean out the cage. And that only happened once a month.

Once a month did not really count, in Felix’s opinion.

‘Oh well, at least Flo understands,’ Felix said to himself. He slumped back into his seat and stared out of the window.

School had definitely become a lot more fun once Flo Small arrived on the scene. Before that Felix used to spend break-time alone in a corner of the playground, mostly doing
stuff like making ‘bug bases’ (which were homes for bugs and beetles built from leaves and twigs and stones) or digging holes in the ground to see if he could get to Australia and
finally meet a real live kangaroo.

He was doing just this on the very first day that he met Flo. She had walked right up to him and said, ‘Are you digging a hole to Australia? If so, you might need some help as it is
actually rather a long way from here.’ And she had got down on her hands and knees and started digging before Felix had thought of anything to say.

From that day on, Felix and Flo were always together and they didn’t care if the Girls Who Giggled teased them or if the Boys Who Played Football called them names.

Felix grinned to himself as he remembered what Flo had said one morning when she’d ‘had enough of that lot.’

‘You just have to remember that we actually lead far more exciting lives than they do,’ she announced loudly. ‘Yes,’ she said, turning on her heel and shoving her nose in
the air. ‘We are too busy making Secret Important Plans to take any notice of Them.’

And it was true. Flo and Felix had discovered almost right away that they both knew lots of Incredibly Interesting Facts about wildlife. So they had decided to become officially best friends on
that very first day of meeting. And because they lived two streets away from each other it was actually very convenient for them to go round to each other’s houses every once in a while
– or quite a lot, depending on whether Mum said yes or no.

Flo had been the first person to come round when Felix had found a warty brown toad under a rock near the allotments.

‘You are sort of quite cool for a girl,’ Felix had told her, watching her hold the toad and stroke it. ‘Most girls hate toads.’

‘I am not Most Girls,’ Flo had said.

She had not been exaggerating. Flo never squealed if a particularly huge and tickly spider climbed up her legs, and she never ran away if a bee made a beeline towards her, and she never said,
‘Urgh! Disgusting!’ if Felix handed her a centipede or an earthworm. In fact, she was more likely to be the one to have found the centipede or the earthworm in the first place.

She didn’t even mind when Dyson came bounding up to her after swimming in the canal and shook water and slobber all over her.

Felix enjoyed spending time with Flo so much, that he thought it would be totally perfect if they could spend even more time together planning their Latest Animal Activity. And that was when he
had come up with the suggestion of sharing lifts.

*

Mum had pulled up outside Flo’s house now and Felix had already started bouncing up and down in his seat in anticipation of seeing his friend.

‘Mum? Mum! Do you remember when I gave you the Very Good Idea of sharing the school run?’ he squealed.

‘Mmmm,’ said Mum. She was tapping the steering wheel and looking at her watch.

‘Can I go and ring the bell?’ Felix asked.

‘No! You know Flora’s mum doesn’t like to be hassled. They’ll be out in a minute,’ Mum said, looking at her watch again. ‘Or two . . .’

He had mentioned lift-sharing when his uncle was at their place having supper. Felix had realized long ago that if he wanted to bring up new things it was best to do it while
Uncle Zed was there, as he was bound to be on Felix’s side about mostly anything.

‘Flo and me live really close, you see,’ he told his uncle. ‘And it would help you, Mum. You don’t like the school run,’ he added helpfully. ‘In fact, you are
always saying that if they don’t do something about the traffic lights you will personally write to the council and tell them where to stick—’

‘Yes, all right, Felix,’ Mum said. ‘I think you’ve made your point.’

‘But, Mum—’

Uncle Zed quickly cut in above the fight that was threatening to break out. ‘Hey, it’s a cool idea! Think of the energy you’ll save, using one car instead of two, sis?
It’s putting Green before the Machine. Sweet!’

Uncle Zed was always saying things like this.

‘Oh boy,’ said Merv, pushing back his chair and slouching off. ‘Here we go again: “
You must recycle; you must eat mung beans and muesli; you must say
‘dude’ after every sentence
. . .”’

‘Mervin!’ Mum growled. But he had gone.

Zed set to work on Mum after that, persuading her of all the benefits of sharing the school run. Mum was not easily convinced, saying she was ‘not sure I could face having Flora Small in
the back of the car two or three times a week’.

But Zed was a very good persuader, especially when he mentioned things like ‘saving money’ and ‘saving time’, which were things Mum was always worrying about wasting. So
in the end Mum had relented, muttering, ‘Who would have thought sharing lifts with Flora Small would be a good thing for the planet?’

As a result, Felix was a very happy boy indeed.

Good Thing for the planet or not, it had to be said that Flo could be very (what Mum privately called) Full of Herself in the mornings. Being Full of Herself basically
consisted of Flo talking non-stop rubbish from the minute she opened the car door, according to Mum. And non-stop rubbish was not something Mum generally found easy to deal with first thing in the
day.

This morning was no exception.

‘Did you know that my dad once got attacked by a Real Live Elephant?’ Flo announced, flinging open the passenger door.

Felix beamed. This was exactly why sharing lifts with Flo was a brilliant idea.

‘Good morning, Flora,’ said Mum wearily.

Flo bounced on to the back seat next to Felix and chucked her school bag over her shoulder into the boot, thereby giving Dyson’s snoring snout its second near miss of the day.

‘It was wild, the elephant,’ Flo chattered on, her eyes wide and shining.

Mum turned the radio up suddenly so that the boring man’s voice got a bit too loud and meant Flo had to really shout above the news and the traffic reports and the weather and all that
yawn-worthy stuff to get Mum to listen to her.

‘Yes! A Real Live
Wild
Elephant, right—’

‘Strap yourself in, Flora, please,’ said Mum.

‘How can it have been wild if it attacked your dad?’ Felix asked excitedly, getting Bernard the snail out of his pocket and stroking the shell. ‘Was he in India or Africa at
the time?’

‘No, he was in Croydon,’ said Flo, pulling the seat belt out in furious long loops. ‘Where his important office work is. WOW!’ She started at the sight of Bernard making
his way across the back of Felix’s hand. ‘Is that a—?’

Felix shook his head violently to stop Flo Giving the Game Away to Mum about Bernard and said loudly: ‘Go on – what happened?’

Now obviously Flo could handle most bugs and creepy-crawly type things and frogs and toads and whatnot, but it just so happened that she was not all that keen on snails, so she made a face and
backed herself into the corner of the car seat, as far away from Bernard as possible. ‘We-ell, this Real Live Wild Elephant had escaped from the zoo—’

‘Aha! So it wasn’t wild then!’ Felix cut in, triumphantly waving poor Bernard in the air. The snail zipped back inside his shell in fright. ‘It couldn’t have been
wild if it was in a zoo – animals in zoos are Captivated Animals, you see.’

Flo gave Felix a long hard look with narrowed eyes and crunched-up eyebrows, and Felix stopped feeling so triumphant. ‘So,’ he said, a bit nervously, ‘what happened
next?’

‘So the WILD elephant,’ said Flo firmly, ‘charged at Dad, which was very frightening as he was driving one of those beetle-shaped cars at the time so he couldn’t run
away. You know the kind I mean. What are they called, those beetle-shaped cars?’ Flo called out to Mum.

Mum turned the radio down a tiny bit and said, ‘Beetles.
Volkswagen
Beetles, to be precise.’

Flo frowned and then shrugged. ‘One of those, yes. He was driving a
Forksvargen
-Beetle-to-be-precise, and then this wild elephant charged at him and stuck his tusks
right through
the seat
!’ She started kicking the back of Mum’s seat in a determined and rhythmical way as if to emphasize her point.

Mum let out a strangled snarl.

Felix gasped. Why did exciting things like this always happen to
Flo’s
family? His dad just cycled everywhere. He did not have a car shaped like a beetle, and he had never seen so
much as a
badger
on his way to work, let alone a wild elephant. Then again, Felix realized, Dad probably wouldn’t tell him even if he
had
seen a wild elephant or a badger. His
head was so full of strange work language, such as: ‘You’ve got to push the envelope’ and ‘I think we should think outside of the box’ and ‘It’s not rocket
science’, that he wouldn’t remember about the elephant or the badger by the time he got home in the evening.

‘Wouldn’t it be cool to
own
an elephant!’ Flo cried suddenly, kicking Mum’s seat a bit too hard this time.

‘Sit. Still. Flora.’ Mum sounded as if she was trying to hold pins in her mouth without dropping them.

‘If I was going to own a wild animal,’ Felix began, reaching for the book on apes and flicking through the pages, ‘I would prefer one of these monkeys that can
climb—’

But Flo wasn’t listening to Felix. She wasn’t listening to Mum either. She was bouncing up and down vigorously, straining at her seat belt as if gravity had suddenly stopped
working.

‘An
elephant
would be so much more exciting to own than, say, a
snail
,’ she said. She fixed Felix with one eyebrow raised in a challenging sort of way.

‘Felix!’ Mum snapped. ‘You haven’t brought that snail into the car, have you?’

‘Oooo, an elephant!’ said Felix enthusiastically. He decided to take Flo’s lead – anything if it meant Mum could be diverted from the presence of Bernard. ‘It would
be totally amazing to have an actual elephant, yes. But how do you think you get to be an Owner of an Elephant – or any wild animal at all?’ he added, sticking out his bottom lip
thoughtfully. ‘That is, unless you are a zookeeper, which I am not.’

‘I think you have to prove that you are going to look after it in a responsible way,’ Flo said. ‘I should ask your Uncle Zed,’ she went on. ‘He knows everything
about all the animals in the world, doesn’t he?’

‘Mmmm,’ said Felix. ‘
Almost
everything.’ Zed hadn’t known what to do about the bird Felix had found in the garden which wouldn’t fly and wouldn’t
walk and wouldn’t eat the bread and milk he got for it. It had died in the end.

‘Of course, it would need tons and tons of green stuff to eat,’ continued Flora. ‘Does your dad grow enough green stuff for an elephant to eat, d’you think?’

Felix chewed a fingernail and thought it sounded suspiciously as though Flo was having one of her Missions. When Flo had one of her Missions, it usually meant that Felix ended up getting
involved in something he couldn’t quite remember agreeing to. Like the time Flo had persuaded him that it would be a very Scientific Experiment About Gravity if they put Hammer the hamster at
the top of the slide in the garden to see how quickly he would get to the bottom. Everything would probably have been all right if Colin the cat had not noticed and flung himself out of the apple
tree in the path of the sliding hamster with the word ‘LUNCH’ written all over his fangs. Felix had been grounded for a week and Hammer had been so traumatized that the vet had had to
give him some special medicine called Sedatives which had Cost the Earth.

Flo stopped bouncing and picked her nose instead. Then she wiped it quietly on the back of Mum’s seat while looking at Mum’s reflection in the rear-view mirror in
an entirely innocent and charming way.

‘Hmm. Yes, I think your uncle would know exactly how to get hold of an elephant,’ she said. ‘And if you looked after it then that would help to protect it from being hunted for
its Ivory Bits.’

‘It’s terribly sad, that hunting thing,’ Felix said knowledgeably. ‘They use the Ivory Bits for things like drinking horns.’

Flo rolled her eyes. ‘Derrrr! Not any more – that was in the Olden-Fashioned Days,’ she said in exasperation. ‘But they
do
use them for making pianos, you know. I
used to have a piano with Ivory Bits for the keyboard – only the white part, obviously. The black keys cannot be made from ivory, as ivory is not black.’

This was so fascinating that Felix had now completely forgotten about the elephant idea. He sat back, his book on apes lying discarded beside him. He had also forgotten about Bernard who had
worked his way out of Felix’s pocket and on to the edge of the car seat and was making for the door handle.

‘So what is the black part of the piano made of?’ Felix asked, eyes wide in wonder.

‘Oh, sabre-toothed tigers’ teeth,’ said Flo airily.

‘Wow!’ said Felix. It never ceased to amaze him how wonderfully wise and full of information his best friend was. He had not even known that sabre-toothed tigers
had
black
teeth.