Ben's Monkey

Quest
Jack and Hannah Ormerod and Lucia, Delphine & Fin
Sat 9 Jul 2016 14:30
Hi Everybody, 


The witch came back from Haiti so the house-sitting hobos, Ben, Philippa and their girls, have moved from their mountain house. The witch drives down now to Grenada Marine on Thursday mornings to sell her fruits and juices. To be honest, she doesn’t seem much like a witch in person, she’s blond, wears glasses, smiles a lot and looks like she could drive a Vauxhall Astra rather than a pink jeep with half-a-million miles on the clock and holes in the floor. She looks at us warmly when she sees us but we haven’t plucked up the courage to make any contact with her and when we don’t, she looks a little confused and checks if her stuff is still there. I’m not sure if it’s right to break it to her that we’ve already been to her house not once but twice and stared at her sea turtle shell and half-eaten tiger-skin rug on the wall. I have to say though that the bottled citrus cordials she sells in the car park in Grenada Marine are really nice; Ben took a couple out of the larder when we came up to her house. Last Thursday I gave Jack a tenner when he was going to the cafe. ‘Maybe we should buy a bottle of her juice.’ ‘No way,’ was the response. ‘You’re crazy,’ Lu chips in, ‘everyone knows you don’t drink witch’s potions.’ Ok, I thought. I was kind of thirsty. 

The hobos aren’t quite ready to come back to living on a boat. They got another offer to house-sit instead and being the hobos they are plus the fact that this house has a swimming pool, repeat a swimming pool, they were as happy as those rats in the bins at the back of a certain West London hospital I used to work at. Man, those were big rats. Sorry about the image but I will never be able to completely erase them out of my mind and whenever I think happy, I can’t help but think those guys. This house however, is neither ratty nor mountain-based with eight dogs living underneath in pens, it’s modern and concrete and located in a gated community on a finger of a Southern peninsula. These gated-community fingers are where most of the fancy people live here. So you’re probably thinking the same thing we did; the house-sitting hobos scored! Right now, they’re house-sitting for a young family who are renting while working for the UN. The UN is rebuilding the Parliament building in Grenada. ‘Do you meet your colleagues again in different countries?’ I asked them before they left, thinking of the UN as sort of one big family-like network, meeting in place after place all around the world. ‘No,' they said, 'if you get posted to Grenada, you tend not to move again.’ Oh right. So Grenada to the UN is like Florida to retiring ice road truck drivers or crusty Alaskan crab fishermen.

With the hobos being the most sociable and gregarious of types, they've invited us over a couple of times to swim and hang out in their new ‘home’. Surely being the friends of house-sitting hobos must be at the very bottom of an imaginary house-based pecking order. I’m not sure that the actual landlord of the property or the UN guys, however generous as they are, would be very pleased to see the Ormerod family turn up with their big, black, shaggy dog to swim in their pool. Still, no one loves the pool more than Fin. She’s never swam in an actual pool before and she seems to relish the lack of potential predators in this watery environment; she swims and jumps in and swims some more. It's impossible not to love watching her love it and last Sunday, we’d just finished lunch on the UN peoples' balcony when Ben says, ‘I had a monkey once and he loved it when we went down rivers on our boat,’ We turned to him. ‘You had a monkey?’ He nodded, his eyes widened a little and the sea behind us stretched out as blue as a song bird's egg. Here goes.

'Before I went to Trinidad,' he says,' and eventually picked up Dhanu, I worked for a Dutch company in Guyana, logging. The regulation was that the jungle grew twenty cubic metres a year and you could take six but of course, no one followed the rules. There was no one around to check. I built a treehouse forty-feet high and lived in it with my girlfriend and we had this little monkey who came out of the jungle. The monkey used to help her make bread. When I came in from work all you could see were his black eyes, the rest of him was completely white from being covered in flour. He used to sit on my shoulder on a little lead too and when I travelled on the river, he would lean forwards into the wind, shoulders first, hands clenched, bracing his little body.' He makes an impression of the monkey and we all laugh. Except Lu. 'Why was the monkey on a leash?' No one answers.

'One day,' Ben says, 'I was logging with two other guys when the radiator on one of the diggers blew up and a guy was covered with boiling water. It was really bad. The next morning his skin was literally a balloon and we knew we'd have to take him for help. Me and this other guy got him in the boat and started making our way down river. It took us hours to get to the town with a hospital but we got there in the end, dropped him off and started making our way back home in the dark.' He pauses. 'Have you ever travelled in the jungle by river?' We all think about it which takes about a millisecond, then shake our heads. Even Delphine. 'Well at night time,' Ben says, 'you travel by looking above you rather than in front of you. The jungle becomes pitch-black so you know if you can see the stars overhead then you're following the river ok.' We nod, grateful for the jungle-river driving tip. 'Except,' he says, smiling slightly, 'I'd miscalculated where we'd passed the fallen tree on the way there. In the light.' We wince. 'You did?' 'Which goes to show,' Philippa interrupts, 'that you probably should look forwards as well as looking up when driving a dinghy at night.' Ben nods in her direction but it's like he doesn't really see her. 

'We hit the tree so hard that the boat completely spilt through the middle. When I came to, I could see it wedged in the branches of the fallen tree about fifteen feet in the air. The outboard engine was hanging in a branch at the back, still going. I looked around for the other guy and found he'd broken his leg and badly, at least in two places. Yeah,' Ben says, stopping to take a drag of a rollie, 'it wasn't good. I couldn't get him out of the water either, it was just too hard to lift him so I held him up to a tree all night long. I held him there until the morning until another boat came past and spotted us and took us both to the hospital.' 'Did you hurt yourself?' I ask. 'Just my ear,' Ben says and turns to show us a scar sliced across the top of his ear. 'Did you see the guy who'd you taken to hospital the day before?' 'No, but he came back to work after he'd got better.' We exhale slowly, all along with Ben's rollie. 

'What happened to the monkey?' Lu pipes up. 'Yeah, the monkey.' Ben grimaces. 'The monkey died. A branch went straight through him. It was really sad. You know, he used to do the funniest thing. When you woke up every morning he used to stand over you, exerting his monkey dominance.' Lulu frowns. 'How do you mean?' Ben pauses. 'Well, it's sort of a boy thing.' At this, Jack begins to laugh while all of us girls stay silent at the table. As the story goes on, Jack becomes less able to control himself until tears begin to pour out of his eyes. All over Ben's monkey. 

Love from F/F Quest her crew xx