The Chalk Giants (10 page)

In this way Monkey came to understand the land in which he lived. The concept of ‘island’, though suggested by the maps, was more difficult to grasp. The many sheets, placed edge to edge, alarmed with their suggestion of headward immensity. At first, Monkey’s brain tended to spin; with time, he grew more assured. He kept tallies of his journeys now, scratching the days carefully on the greasy wooden sides of Truck. Soon he found his head could tell him, nearly without thought, the time of travel between any two points on his maps. Also the drawings themselves grew other marks, made by Monkey with the yellow drawing-stick that was his greatest treasure. He sketched where wild wheat grew, and where the land was good for hunting; and Pru and Sal, though they betrayed no outward gratitude, became sleek and well-filled. The larder of Truck was stocked to capacity; and Monkey, as is the way with men, looked about him for fresh worlds to conquer.

The adventure on which he decided almost proved his undoing. He turned Truck headwards, or north, resolved to travel as far as possible in this as yet unexplored direction; though he no longer harboured illusions as to the magnitude of the journey. Pru and Sal clopped steadily, day after day, indifferent as ever; and day after day Monkey squatted on his little rubbery heels, staring through the forward spyhole in breathless expectation of wonders. The tally lines grew again, wobbling across the dark wooden sides of Truck; hills appeared obediently to either hand, each in its allotted place. Monkey knew them now at a glance, reading their brown thumbprints on his maps. For a time, all went smoothly enough; then difficulties started to arise.

The first had to do with certain areas on the maps where the roads ran together in ever-thickening jumbles. Monkey steered for one of these, curious to see what such oddness could portend; but a whole day from his destination Pru and Sal stopped abruptly, stamping and shivering, giving vent to little hard anxiety-cries. Monkey, irritated, urged them forward; but his howls and hangings went unheeded. Pru and Sal danced with distress, shaking their heads and snorting; then, abruptly, they bolted. Truck, turned willy-nilly, jolted and crashed while Monkey clung on grimly, rolling from side to side in a confusion of legs and arms and maps. Dusk was falling before the wild flight eased; the tallies were ruined, and Monkey himself was lost.

He lay a day or more in a dull stupor of rage before he again took heart. As ever, the sidewaysness of the sun. encouraged him; he spread the maps out once more, while Truck ambled slowly between rolling, gently-wooded bills. In time a higher hill, rearing dark against the sunset, gave him a reference. His good humour returned; for Pru and Sal jogged submissively, and the tallies were not wholly lost. The sideways or three-fingerward projection to which he had been subjected during their flight counted for little; he marked the map, using his drawing-stick, and turned Truck again on to its proper heading-

Twice more, the odd confluences were avoided by Pru and Sal; these times Monkey, prepared for their defection, found it easier to redirect their course. Whatever lay at the mysterious junctures must, it seemed, be avoided; for the present, he bowed to the inevitable.

For five more days the journey proceeded smoothly; then came the greatest shock of all. Far too soon - barely a half of the tally was complete - Monkey found the way impassably barred. Ahead, and to either side, stretched the sea.

The shock to his overstrained nerves was considerable. For a time, stupidly, he urged Truck forward, as if refusing to acknowledge the impossibility; the water was hissing round the axles, and Pru and Sal were keeningwith dismay, before he came to his senses. He sat a whole half day, glaring and fretting, staring at the map and back to the great blue barrier. Then he turned Truck three-fingerward. Two days passed before the sea once more swung round to bar his path; the proper sea this time, in its designated place. Monkey turned back, every hour adding to his alarm. The green and brown, green and brown of the map went on; yet still the lying, deceitful land shelved to the water, vanished beneath the waves. The tally grew again, senseless now and wild. Monkey howled and sobbed, picking his nose with rage; but the salty goodies brought no comfort. He threshed impotently, till the springs of Truck groaned and creaked and Pru and Sal stooped clucking, voices harsh with concern. But Monkey was unconsolable. His bright new world was shattered.

He felt himself losing control. His hands and limbs, wobbly at the best, refused to obey him. His nights were haunted; he wetted himself uncontrollably, till Truck exuded a rich sharp stink and half a whole map was spoiled.  Madness, had it intervened, would have been a merciful release; but he was saved, finally, by a curious sight.

For a day or more the ground had been steadily rising; now, just after dawn, Monkey saw ahead of him the crest of a mighty cliff. The land, no longer gentle, broke away in a great crashing tumble of boulders and clay round which the sea frothed and seethed, flinging streamers of foam high in the air. Monkey huddled back, waving Truck on, anxious to be gone from the place; but at the height of the rise he began to thump and squeal. Pru and Sal stopped indifferently, their hair whipping round their heads, their curved, hard fingers hooked across the handle of Truck. The wind seethed in the grass; clouds sailed the early, intense sky; but Monkey had eyes for nothing but the Road.

It had been a great road, the widest and finest he had seen. It came lancing out of distance, its twin broad ribbons dark blue and cracked and proud. It soared to the edge of the cliff; and at the edge, on the very lip, it stopped.

Monkey raised himself, cautiously; then banged the side of Truck, ordering it forward. Pru and Sal moved slowly, unwilling now, straining back from the lip of the cliff; but Monkey’s fear was forgotten. He stared, seeing how the road ended terrifyingly in a sudden, jagged edge. Below, white birds rode the updraught, tiny as scraps of paper. The sea crashed and boiled; and Monkey, screwing his eyes, saw what in his misery had eluded him. Far across the water, dim with distance but unmistakable, the brown and green, brown and green started again, marching out of sight.

He fell back; and relief was like a balm. Once more, he had understood; and the second Mystery was stranger than the first. The land had been changed after the maps were made.

The maps lived to the right of Truck, in their shallow compartment. Each part of Truck, each fragment of the tiny inner space, was apportioned with equal care. To Monkey’s left was the area designated, in later times at least, Garage Accessories. The Accessories themselves didn’t amount to much. There was a sleekly polished red oil can; beside it, tucked in tightly to prevent unpleasing rattles, the piece of rag with which Monkey furbished the metal, keeping it bright. Next to the oil can lived a tin of thick brown grease, with which Monkey anointed the axles of Truck whenever the elements conspired to draw from them high-pitched, irritating squeaks. Other Accessories were even less prepossessing. There was the galvanized nail with which Monkey prised up the lid of the tin (seconded lately for the important function of journey-marking) a small rusty spanner which fitted nothing about Truck but which Monkey kept anyhow, and an even more curious fetish: a little yellow wheel, made of some substance that flexed slightly in the fingers and was pleasant to hold and suck. Like the spanner, it served no discernible function; but Monkey was equally loth to throw it away. ‘You can never tell,’ he would bawl sometimes at the unresponding heads of Pru and Sal, ‘when it might Come In.’

At Monkey’s feet a locker closed by a rusty metal hasp constituted the Larder. Here he kept the flat grey wheatcakes that sustained him, and his bottles and jars of brook water. Other chunks of rag, stuffed carefully into the spaces between the containers, checked the clinking that would otherwise have spoiled his rest. Next to Larder, a corner compartment was crammed with spare rag, blankets and a blackened lace pillowslip. It also housed a broken piece of mirror, carefully wrapped and tucked away. Once, Monkey had gashed himself badly on its edge; now it was never used.

To either side of his head as he lay were the Tool Chest and the Library. The Tool Chest contained an auger, a small pointed saw, three empty cardboard tubes and a drum of stout green twine. The Library was full to overflowing, so full its lid could scarcely be forced down. Sometimes Monkey would take the topmost books out, lie idly turning the pages, marvelling at the endless repetition of delicate black marks. The marks meant nothing to him; but the books had always been there, and so were accepted and respected. Like Truck, they were a part of his life.

Between its several compartments Truck was fretted by a variety of holes, all seemingly inherent to the structure. The spyholes, covered when not in use by sliding flaps of leather, afforded Monkey sideways and frontal vision. Beneath him, concealed by a hinged wooden trap, was the Potty Hole; to either side smaller apertures, or Crumb Holes, enabled him occasionally to clean the littered interior of Truck. He would spend an hour or more carefully scraping together the mess of wheatcake crumbs, twigs and blanket fluff, pushing the fragments one by one through the holes. The activity had enlivened many a grey, otherwise unedifying afternoon; it cheered him, giving him a sense of purpose.

Pru and Sal formed the other major components of Monkey’s mobile world. How they had come to him, or he to them, he was unsure. Certainly there had been a time - he remembered it now and then in vague, dreamlike snatches -when there had been no Pru and Sal. And also, he was nearly certain, no Truck. He remembered firelight and warmth, and lying on a bed not enclosed by tall wooden sides. He remembered hands that touched, a voice that crooned and cried. Also he remembered a bleak time of wailing and distress. The figures loomed round him, dim and massive as trees; there were other deeper voices, harder hands. One such pair of hands, surely, had placed him for the first time inside Truck. He remembered words, though they made little sense.

‘Lie there, Monkey. You’re with me now. Poor bloody little Monkey. You’re with me ...’

He didn’t like the dream to come too often. It woke him alone in Truck, miserable and cold, crying for the hands and voices that had gone.

Maybe Pru and Sal had stolen him, as he lay supine in his bright new Truck. No one else would ever know; and they, perhaps, no longer remembered or cared. They too had become a part of his life. Always, as he lay brooding or contentedly dozing, their shoulders and heads were visible, outlined darkly against the sky. Their brown thin hands were clamped, eternally it seemed, round the wide handle of Truck; their feet thumped and pattered down the years.

In appearance, Pru and Sal were not unalike. Their hair, long, frayed and bleached by the sun, hung stiffly from their small rounded skulls. Their skin, tanned by the outside wind, had assumed the colour of old well-seasoned wood. Their eyes were small, slitlike and blank; their faces, untroubled by thought, ageless and smooth. Their fingers, over the years, had grown curved and stiff; good for killing, useless for the more delicate manipulations at which Monkey excelled. They dressed alike, in thick kilts of an indeterminate hue; and their voices, when they troubled to use them, were also alike, as harsh and croaking as the voices of birds.

For Monkey, secure in his endlessly roving home, the seasons passed pleasantly enough. Pru and Sal, in their motiveless fashion, tended him well. On rainy days, and in the dark cold time of winter, they drew across the open hood of Truck a tall flap of stiff grey canvas. Then Monkey would crawl invisibly in the warm dark, sucking and chuckling, groping among the crumbs of Larder, tinkling his jars of ice-cold chill, while the feet of Pru and Sal thudded out their comfort on paths and roads unseen. These, perhaps, were the best times of all; when snow whirled dark against the leaden strip of sky, and ice beaded the high hood of Truck and wolves called lost and dim.

Sometimes the snowflakes whirled right into Truck, tiny unmelting stars from outer air; and fires would leap, in clearings and unknown caves. In the mornings Pru and Sal must smash and crash at the ice of brooks while the wind whistled thin in thin dead grass.

Though springtimes too were good. The breeze stirred gentle and mild, rich with new scents; the sky brightened, filling with the songs of birds. Pru and Sal, clucking and mumbling, would draw back the canvas cover, allowing the cheesy air to whistle cheerfully from Truck; and Monkey would sit up, chuckling, feeling the new warmth on his great blotched hairless face. Summers he would lie naked, rubbing pleasure from his mounded belly while the warm rain fell, sizzling on his heated flesh. At night the stars hung lustrous and low, and trees were silent mounds of velvet cloth.

But the map reading changed, for all time, Monkey’s life. The great adventure ended, it seemed a hollowness formed in his mind. Truly, he was satisfied with his conquered Island; and not unmoved by his discovery of its truncated state. New sights and sounds presented themselves each day; a waterfall, a forest, a bird, a lake. But novelty itself can pall. Monkey, mumbling and frowning, hankering for he knew not what, began, irritably, the formal tidying of Truck. Each object he came to -so known, once loved - seemed now merely to increase his frustration. His wheel, his drawing-stick, his spanner, lay discarded. The axles of Truck set up an intermittent squeal, but Monkey merely sneered. He tidied Larder and Blanket Store, dipped desultorily into Garage Accessories. Nothing pleased him. Finally, he turned to Library.

Almost at once he discovered a curious thing. The locker was deeper than it had always appeared. The blockage was caused by books that had swelled with damp, jamming their covers firmly against the outer wooden skin of Truck. Monkey puffed and heaved, straining unaccustomed muscles. Finally the hindrances came clear. He emptied the compartment to its bottom, sat back surrounded by books he had never seen. He opened one at random and instantly frowned, feeling a flicker of excitement for the first time in weeks.

The book was unlike the others in one major respect. Monkey huddled nearer the light, crowing and drooling, turning the pages with care. Some were glued irretrievably by damp; on others he saw, beside the squiggling marks, certain drawings. They were detailed and complex, many of them in colour; he had no difficulty in recognizing flowers and trees. Monkey, who had invented drawing, felt momentarily abashed; but the rise of a new idea soon drove self-awareness from him. He stared from the drawings to the little marks, and back. He tilted his head, first to one side then to the other. He laid the book down, picked it up, opened it again. Later he sat for an hour or more peering over the side of Truck, seeing the stony ground jog and jerk beneath. In time he made himself quite giddy. He closed his eyes, opened his mouth, laid his gums to the hard wood edge. Small shocks from the wheels and springs were transmitted to his skull.