Free Summer at World's End by Monica Dickens Page B

—’
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    She got Lester and Liza into the car. Tom and Carrie stood at the edge of the ditch and watched them drive away. Liza’s white face looked back wistfully. Lester was on the floor.

14
    There was no time to worry about what would happen on Sunday if Miss McDrane found no motherly woman at World’s End.
    Joey, the black woolly monkey, was in trouble. Bad trouble.
    Not that trouble was a new thing with him. He was supposed to be in his big cage if there was no one with him. But everyone hated to see him in there, and everyone was always taking him out.
    And then forgetting him.
    By the time they remembered, or came back from school, or woke in the morning, the room would look as if a horde of desperadoes had rampaged through it, searching for buried treasure.
    Books hurled from the bookcase. Pages torn out and scattered all over the floor. Em’s knitting wool wound in a maze round table legs and chairs. Michael’s invention for draining spaghetti smashed into matchsticks on the kitchen flagstones. Drawers open and ransacked. Towels draped on the pictures and over the cracked bust of Queen Victoria without a nose, which Lester had found at the dump and brought as an Easter present. Cup handles broken off and stuffed down the sink. Saucers slid under the dresser. Joey himself swinging in Carrie’s bridle which hung on a door knob, black eyes gleaming from a face plastered white with scouring powder.
    ‘Sometimes I wonder,’ Mother had said, snatching awayan aspirin bottle, which Joey had found in the bathroom, ‘whether this darling creature is a suitable pet for you.’
    ‘He’s not our pet,’ Carrie said. ‘He’s our friend.’
    ‘Well … ‘ Mother could not deny that, since it was she who had taught them, years ago, to treat animals as equals, not possessions. ‘But it’s the wrong kind of life for a jungle animal.’
    ‘But it’s a life. He’d have died in the awful pet shop. And if he’d gone for research —’
    ‘He’ll die if he eats all the aspirin, you can tell him from me.’
    Medicine bottles of any kind were Joey’s passion. When Mrs Figg had been sitting outside the house, she had put her handbag on the ground. Joey had opened it while she was talking to Lester, and found the bottle of slimming pills, which she carried about like a good luck charm, but never actually took, because they were supposed to take away your appetite, and being slim wasn’t worth that.
    They found Joey next morning in his chair by the stove, with the empty bottle in his limp hand.
    ‘Dead!’ shrieked Michael, who had come down first.
    Carrie came running. ‘He’s passed out.’
    They wrapped him in a rug, and Em ran down the lane to get Mr Peasly’s taxi. He rushed them through the country roads, leaning hard over, like a racing driver, to corner on two screaming wheels. Carrie had been slapping Joey to keep him awake. In the taxi, Mr Peasly’s driving did it for her.
    Alec Harvey, the vet, was a cheerful young man who was not surprised at anything that came through his surgery door. Local children brought him frogs and fish and birds with broken wings. If they couldn’t pay, he helped them anyway. A mother from the new housing estate, which was called Newtown, had brought herscreaming baby once, because the doctor wouldn’t come and she couldn’t get to the hospital. Alec Harvey had taken a green and white marble out of the baby’s ear. He had it displayed in a jar on a shelf, and had stuck a medicine bottle label on the frame of his vet’s certificate: ‘Also Baby Doctor.’
    ‘A monkey on slimming pills.’ He scratched his curly brown head. ‘They didn’t teach us
that
in college.’
    He and Tom gave Joey a double dose of ipecacuana, to make him throw up the pills. Nothing happened, except that Joey looked more uncomfortable than before, and began to cry a litle, rounding his mouth to say, ‘Oh, oh, oh,’ in Carrie’s lap.
    ‘Now listen here, you beggar,’ Mr Harvey