Monkey Island

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PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF PAULA FOX

Winner of the Hans Christian Andersen Award

Winner of the
Paris Review's
Hadada Award

“The greatest writer of her generation.” —Jonathan Franzen

“One of America's most talented writers.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Consistently excellent.”
—The New York Times

“Fox has always been adept at writing apparently simple stories which on closer examination prove to explore the essential meaning of relationships … and to illuminate our understanding of the human condition.”
—School Library Journal

“Paula Fox is so good a novelist that one wants to go out in the street to hustle up a big audience for her.… Fox's brilliance has a masochistic aspect: I will do this so well, she seems to say, that you will hardly be able to read it. And so she does, and so do I.” —Peter S. Prescott,
Newsweek

“Fox is one of the most attractive writers to come our way in a long, long time.” —
The New Yorker

“As a writer, Fox is all sensitive, staring eyeball. Her images break the flesh. They scratch the retina … Fox's prose hurts.” —Walter Kirn,
New York
magazine

“Fox's achievement is to write with magnificent restraint and precision about the interplay of personal and historical, inner growth and outer framework, the process of learning to think about oneself and the world.” —Margaret and Michael Rustin

“Fox has little of Roth's self-consciousness, less of Bellow's self-importance, and none of Updike's self-pity. Unlike all three men, Fox does not jealously save the best lines for a favoured alter ego, and her protagonists do not have a monopoly on nuance. Instead, she distributes her formidable acumen unselfishly, so that even the most minor characters can suddenly offer crucial insight, and unsympathetic characters are often the most fascinating: brilliant, unfathomable and raging.” —Sarah Churchwell

“There are no careless moves in the fiction of Paula Fox.… [Her] work has a purity of vision, and a technique undiminished by
homage
or self-indulgence.” —Randal Churb,
The Boston Review

“Paula Fox is as good as her revived reputation suggests.” —Fiona Maazel,
BOMB

Monkey Island

ALA Best Book for Young Adults

ALA Notable Book for Children

A Horn Book Fanfare Selection

“An emotionally powerful story … These are characters readers will understand and care about … Masterfully crafted.”
—The Horn Book Magazine
, starred review

“[Fox] tells with almost unbearable clarity about a boy's quest to find himself.”
—Booklist
, starred review

“Exquisitely crafted with spare but resonant detail—an absorbing, profoundly disturbing but ultimately hopeful story.”
—Kirkus Reviews
, pointer review

“Delicate and moving … A relentless story that succeeds in conveying the bitter facts.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“A quietly terrifying, wholly compelling novel … Once again, Fox displays her remarkable ability to render life as seen by a sensitive child.… Clear-eyed and unblinking as ever, she shows us the grit, misery and despair of the homeless.”
—Publishers Weekly

“A carefully crafted, thoughtful book.”
—School Library Journal

Monkey Island

Paula Fox

For Andrew Lee Sigerson

and his dear mother, Kathleen

Contents

1   The Hotel

2   Outside

3   Calvin and Buddy

4   Escaping Notice

5   The Coffee Van

6   Monkey Island

7   Out Cold

8   Oxygen

9   The Biddles

10   Searching, Finding

About the Author

1   The Hotel

Clay Garrity's mother, Angela, had been gone five days from the room in the hotel where they had been living since the middle of October.

On the first evening of her disappearance, he'd waited until long past dark before going to a small table that held a hot plate, a few pieces of china, two glasses, and some cutlery as well as their food supply: a jar of peanut butter, half a loaf of bread in a plastic sack, some bananas, a can of vegetable soup, and a box of doughnuts.

His mother usually heated soup for their supper and made hot cereal for his breakfast in the pot that sat on the hot plate. Clay lifted the lid. There was nothing inside. During their first week in the hotel, she had made a stew that lasted them for three days. That was the only time she had really cooked.

He ate a banana, then picked up the box of doughnuts. Beneath it, he found twenty-eight dollars and three quarters.

He wasn't especially worried yet about her not coming home. She'd been gone entire days before, not returning until nightfall. But the sight of the money made him uneasy.

Why had she left it there, almost hidden, as if she meant for him to find it after she'd gone? Could she have forgotten it? Where would you go in New York City without money? Still, she might have put the twenty-eight dollars aside for something special, like the clinic where she went for checkups, or for the new shoes she said he would soon need. The quarters could have been for making phone calls. And she might have had more money in her pocketbook. But he couldn't quite believe that, because she hardly ever had more than twenty-five dollars after buying their groceries.

He ate half of a doughnut as he stood at the table, staring at the carton of milk that stood outside on the sill of one of the room's two windows. He thought of pouring himself a glass, but, in a flash, he didn't want it at all. Even the rest of the doughnut felt too thick to go down his throat.

He took the only chair in the room, straight backed and painted with a color his mother called down-and-out brown, to the other window and sat there a while, looking at the street five stories below. The traffic was light at this hour. Most of the people who drove past the hotel on their way to the tunnels that went to New Jersey had gone home by now.

Clay imagined a tunnel going under the Hudson River, imagined the dark, moving water above it and beneath it, people in their cars who talked and listened to their radios that must crackle at such a depth, under so much water and earth and concrete.

On the floor beside his mother's bed was a small, battery-run radio. In the mornings while he was getting ready for school, washing his face at the basin and dressing, his mother would listen to a news program. Lately, she had been turning the radio on as soon as she came into the room, even before taking off her coat and putting down the bag of groceries she was carrying. When he did his homework, she lowered the volume. But she seemed to want some kind of sound all the time and didn't care whether it was music or people talking.

Once when he awoke in the night, needing to go to the bathroom, which was outside the room and down at the end of the long corridor near the stairs, he saw her lying in bed, holding the radio on her chest, its dial face casting a pale glow on her chin and mouth, a faint babbling noise issuing from it like voices in a distant room.

“Be careful,” she murmured as he went to the door, his key in his hand. He knew that; he knew you always had to be careful when you went outside the room.

He sat absolutely still, his gaze fixed now on the big apartment building across the street through whose windows he could see people moving about in lighted rooms among large potted plants. In the old life, in the apartment where they had once lived with his father, they had had two pots of African violets, and when one of the deep mauve flowers bloomed, it seemed to fill his mother with delight.

The stillness that had come over him was almost like sleep. It was abruptly broken by an urge to look behind him. The first thing his turning glance fell upon was the wheeled metal rack they had found in the room when they moved into the hotel a month ago, and from which their clothes hung. His mother had told him that when people gave parties, they rented such racks for guests to hang their coats on. Probably the rack was left over from the days when the hotel was a real hotel, not an ants' nest of ugly rooms where people in trouble waited for something better—or worse—to happen to them.

What he saw, hanging from a wire hanger, was his mother's brown wool coat. He placed his hand against the windowpane. It was cold, like the door of a refrigerator. Where would she have gone? Without her coat?

Soon, he would have to go out to the corridor and to the bathroom that was used by nearly everyone on the floor, though he'd heard there was one room that had its own toilet and tub instead of just a washbasin. He would have to lock the door and hope there were no people leaning against the walls, people who would watch his every step as he went toward a battered door you couldn't lock, and into the bathroom with its tub full of fans of tobacco-colored stains, the toilet sweating moisture.

But he couldn't go to the bathroom right now, though he needed to. He took a book from a cardboard box that also held some old stubby crayons and a Lego set he no longer played with. Then he pulled his mother's coat off its hanger. He got onto his cot and covered himself with most of it, drew up his legs, and turned the pages of
Robinson Crusoe
to the place where he had stopped reading yesterday. The words he glanced at made no sense at all. He lay there, his finger in the book, the coat collar against his cheek. He was eleven years old, and he had never felt so alone in his life.