Monkey Come Home (4 page)

S
am 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 you 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.’

‘
B
arry!’ 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.

‘
L
adies 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 head 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.’