Monkey Business Read online

  For Thomas and William,

  who never did get their own zoo . . .

  CONTENTS

  1 In the Animal House

  2 The New Best Friend

  3 The Elephant in the Car

  4 Flo Is On A Roll

  5 The Favourite Uncle

  6 Adopting an Elephant

  7 Flo’s New Idea

  8 Felix Goes for Plan B

  9 Flo Goes Ape

  10 Felix Goes Bananas

  11 The Truth About Adoption

  12 Plans Change

  13 Birthday Boy

  14 We’re Going to the Zoo, Zoo, Zoo!

  15 Monkeying Around

  16 Monkeys Behind Bars

  17 Monkey Business

  1

  IN THE

  ANIMAL HOUSE

  ‘Felix, ARE you listening to me? Hel-lo-oh?’

  Mum had pinched her nose between forefinger and thumb and was speaking in what was supposed to be an astronauty sort of voice.

  ‘Mother ship calling Planet Felix! Is there any life on Planet Felix?’

  Felix blinked slowly and looked at Mum. Why did she think talking like that was funny? It actually only made her look embarrassingly weird. He carried on crunching his Monster Pops breakfast cereal slowly and with Great Concentration. It took Great Concentration to keep his mouth that full as the cereal kept trying to pop out. Also it was extremely important that he keep his mouth totally full like that so that he didn’t have to answer Awkward Questions, such as the ones Mum was asking now.

  ‘FELIX!’

  Mum was actually yelling.

  Felix also noticed that her cheeks had gone kind of beetrooty red.

  It dawned on him that Mum was probably not trying to be funny after all.

  ‘Ooh!’ Mum growled in frustration. ‘LISTEN TO ME! I asked you why you thought your school coat was a great place to keep a snail. A LIVE snail! Isn’t it enough that you filled the bath with frogspawn last week? I am taking this slimy mollusc back to where it belongs—’

  It was at that moment that Felix noticed the thing Mum was holding in the hand that hadn’t been pinching her nose. It had the effect of flicking a switch in his brain, and he leaped from the table, shouting through a mouthful of cereal, ‘Give him back!’

  He lunged and grabbed the Superb Specimen that Mum was dangling in front of his face. ‘That’s Bernard. I found him yesterday on the pavement. Someone would have stepped on him if I hadn’t saved him!’ he protested.

  ‘How do you know it’s a he?’ sniggered Merv, Felix’s older brother.

  ‘Don’t,’ Mum said to Merv with feeling.

  But Felix wasn’t listening. He was stroking Bernard’s shell. He had meant to put him in a pot in his bedroom and give him some of those spiky leaves to eat: the ones growing out of the pavement near where he’d found Bernard. But somehow something had got Felix distracted, so Bernard had spent the night in his coat pocket instead.

  Mum should at least be pleased that he had changed his mind about putting Bernard in his pyjama pocket, Felix thought. If the state of that rather, well, flattened ladybird was anything to go by earlier this morning, Bernard might have come to a very sticky end indeed . . .

  Felix sighed.

  Mum was still squawking about there being a ‘Place for Everything and Everything in its Place’.

  Felix curled his top lip. Everyone knew that the place for a snail was in the garden, but everyone also knew (in this family anyway) that Mum Did Not Like Snails in the Garden. Knowing this, surely it was reasonable to assume that Mum should prefer having snails indoors? In fact, the more he thought of it, the more Felix persuaded himself that he had done Mum a favour by adopting Bernard.

  Felix wondered for a tiny micro-nanosecond if he should say as much, but the minute that thought came to an end, Mum’s eyebrows locked into One-Eyebrow Mode and her eyes shone like the eyes of that rather scary silver-backed gorilla on the poster in his room.

  ‘Aha!’ he said under his breath. ‘That reminds me. I need that book on apes to show at school.’ And, shoving Bernard into the pocket of his shorts, he pushed back his chair mumbling, ‘Sorry, Mum – just forgot something.’ He was concentrating so hard on avoiding looking into her scary eyes that he accidentally trod on the dog.

  ‘YOWP!’ yelped Dyson. He had been under the table as usual, snoozing and waiting for crumbs.

  ‘Sorry, Dyson,’ said Felix, patting his dog’s head and elbowing the cat in the face by mistake.

  ‘MIIIIAAAAOW!’ complained Colin. He had been about to pounce on Dyson and now he’d missed his chance.

  ‘Sorry, Colin,’ said Felix, reaching over to stroke the cat, and catching the end of his spoon with his sleeve.

  ‘Feeee-liiiix!’ Mum yelled as his cereal bowl clattered to the floor. ‘Leave those blasted animals alone for once and make your teeth and clean your bed and brush your shoes and GET YOUR HAIR ON! We’re going to be LATE!’

  ‘I’m off then,’ muttered Dad, ramming on his cycle helmet and backing away from the chaos. He picked up a banana and jammed his mobile phone into his backpack. He put the banana to his ear.

  ‘I’ll be there in five,’ he said into the banana.

  Mum’s face had reached boiling point. Her teeth were actually bared like a real live lion’s.

  ‘Sorry, Mum,’ said Felix, stumbling out of the kitchen. He caught the edge of the overcrowded work surface behind him and narrowly missed knocking over the hamster cage. Hammer squeaked furiously. ‘Sorry, Hammer,’ said Felix. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Felix,’ Mum said in a dangerously low tone.

  ‘I’m going, I’m going,’ he said.

  ‘For good?’ Merv sneered through his greasy fringe. ‘I’ll help you pack.’

  ‘MERVIN!’ Mum screeched. ‘DON’T START!’

  This was what you might call an average morning in the Stowe household. Felix rocketed up the stairs two at a time thinking that he really was the only sane person in the whole entire family (well, the human bit of it, anyway).

  ‘Life would be much more fun and interesting if I was a monkey,’ Felix said aloud as he scooted around his room looking for the book on apes. ‘Monkeys live in family groups, but I bet no one ever tells them that they have to clean their teeth or go to school or eat broccoli.’

  He hurled dirty pants and socks and wildlife magazines and bits of Lego over his shoulder as he searched for the book. Ah, there it was – stuffed underneath his box of precious things, in between the dried-up frog and the squashed dragonfly. He tucked the book under one arm, being careful not to squash Bernard – dragonflies were still nice to look at when they were squashed, but snails were definitely not.

  ‘Since I can’t be a monkey,’ he muttered, ambling to the bathroom, ‘maybe I can at least get myself adopted by a family who likes animals?’ He was thinking aloud about this and about the marvellous things that animals do when he walked into the bathroom and came face to face with Merv, who was on the loo.

  ‘Get out, squirt!’ said Merv.

  ‘Phoooar!’ Felix roared, flapping his hands theatrically. ‘It stinks in here!’

  ‘GET OUT!’ Merv thundered.

  ‘Actually, your stinkiness has just reminded me of something incredibly interesting, Merv,’ said Felix, grinning wickedly.

  After all, Merv couldn’t get at him from his current position. He was what you might call a Captured Audience.

  ‘Did you know that cows produce something from their bottoms called methane gas, which is a posh way of saying that they fart a lot?’ Felix continued. ‘Even more than you do! And did you know that cows will probably one day rule the planet, as the ozone layer is filling up with their farts? So that means we are all breathing in cow farts every day and
we humans will probably die because of that? And then only cows will be left in the world. Aren’t cows amazing?’

  ‘You are a fart,’ Merv yelled. ‘GET OUT!’

  Felix blew a raspberry at his brother and hurtled out to the downstairs loo. ‘Doesn’t anyone in this family think it’s cool that we are actually breathing in cow farts every day?’ he muttered, tripping over Dyson, who was snoozing at the bottom of the stairs, and falling heavily on Colin, who had been lying in wait again.

  ‘YEEEEOOOOWL!’ screeched the cat.

  Felix picked himself up and chucked his book on the floor. He carefully checked that Bernard was still in one unsquashed piece, and then went into the cloakroom and shut the door behind him.

  ‘Sorry, Bernard,’ he whispered.

  Felix sighed heavily at his reflection in the mirror. No one understood him. Take last night for another example: all he had done was say that he would like a gecko as a pet. Merv had burped loudly and said, ‘What’s that? Some kind of robot?’ and Mum had said, ‘I am NOT, repeat NOT having any more animals in this house. A dog, a cat, a hamster and a goldfish (OK, an ex-goldfish, but, still, you know what I mean) are quite enough, not to mention the snails and spiders . . . Oh, and not forgetting the frogspawn . . .’

  ‘But, Mum, Jonah the goldfish died weeks ago. And you said I had to let the frogspawn go because it was turning the bath all slimy,’ Felix reminded her. ‘And it’s so boring only having normal pets.’

  ‘BORING?’ Mum snapped. ‘Boring? If only life were boring, that’s what I say. Give me a bit of boring any day of the week . . .’ And then she’d gone off on one about how all she ever seemed to do these days was ‘feed animals, walk animals and clean up after animals and if you think . . .’

  Oh, it was even too boring to try to remember what else Mum had said.

  By now he was deeply engrossed in concocting a plan to make his life more interesting and his family more animal-minded. So deeply engrossed, in fact, that he nearly jumped out of his own skin with shock when Mum’s face suddenly loomed large behind him in the mirror, yelling: ‘FELIX HORATIO STOWE! GET A MOVE ON – WE’RE LATE!’

  2

  THE NEW

  BEST FRIEND

  Mum was sitting in the car in the drive, revving the engine noisily and shouting out of the window.

  ‘Come ON, Felix! We’ve got to get Flora!’

  ‘Yeah, hurry up, squirt. Your girlfriend’s waiting for you,’ Merv sneered, emerging from the bathroom at last.

  Felix stuck his tongue out at his brother, snatched up his book on apes and shoved his feet into his shoes, slung his coat over one arm and his school bag over the other and raced to the car. He closed the door in time to avoid the smelly sock Merv had hurled from the house.

  ‘Flo is NOT my girlfriend,’ he announced, throwing his bag and coat over the back of the seat into the boot, narrowly missing Dyson. Not that the poor dog seemed to mind. He only snorted slightly before shuffling away from the bag and settling back down to sleep.

  ‘Mmmm,’ said Mum distractedly. She was taking Dyson to work with her after dropping Felix and Flo at school. Her office let her do that sort of thing. Dad’s didn’t, which seemed to annoy Mum rather a lot. Felix thought she should be Over the Moon about working in a place that was so cool they let you take your pets to work. He had personally tried on more than one occasion to convince his teacher, Mr Beasley, to have a Bring-Your-Pet-to-School Day, but he had not yet succeeded.

  ‘We are running an educational establishment, not a zoo, Felix,’ Mr Beasley had told him sniffily.

  ‘But having all our different pets to study would be a very Interesting and Educational Thing,’ Felix had persisted.

  His teacher had not agreed.

  This was typical of school. It was all very well when the teachers decided what was Interesting and Educational, but they never did want to take suggestions from the actual people who were there to be educated, i.e. Felix and the other pupils. This was one of the very many reasons why Felix had never had a particularly high opinion of school.

  ‘Mum?’ He leaned forward and shouted at Mum above the noise of the radio. ‘Mum! I’ve just had a brilliant idea. School would be a much better place if instead of all those children who are a Waste of Space and Badly Behaved, they let chimpanzees come instead. And maybe spider monkeys and possibly one or two gorillas as well!’

  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 ha
d 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?’