Monkey Daze

The vervet monkeys visited me today. A big bloke announced his arrival with a thud on the little overhang outside my bedroom window. This ‘overhang’ is not strong and barely holds the rain out of my bedroom, so one day I could have the troop in my bedroom, tumbling one after the other through a great hole. I sat on my bed and watched, and a teenager watched me, his small face full of summer. He twitched his eyebrows and bobbed when I moved. There was a mother with her baby clinging tightly to her stomach, his small arms embedded darkly in the maternal fur as though she carried a cheerful parasite. The light caught his perfect face shining through his big ears, ears he will grow into, transparent in the sunlight like two great pink cockles on his head. His mother knows him, he is her own and she protects him with all her being.

I hear the sounds of pellet guns, and I know a neighbour is trying to chase them off. So many monkeys have pellets in them and they die slow and painful deaths. These people feel they’re pests who are out to attack them and steal their bananas or bread rolls. Now make no mistake, these guys are opportunists of note, and if you leave your custard buns on the kitchen table and the door open, a hairy guy will definitely take them. Monkeys are not out to attack people unless they are threatened, and I would so prefer these intruders to those who could come in if a door was left open, and take so much more than just some fruit. If only these narrow-minded folk would see that we have displaced these animals; their habitats are shrinking and the alien plants enveloping our indigenous trees offer no food for monkeys. These people with pellet guns deserve to be banished to a barren sandy island where there is no wildlife to threaten them, not a single tree for shade or a monkey, and just sea water stretching out in front of them.

I did have a monkey in my kitchen once and he swiped my lunchtime buns. I tried to get them back, but he sat on the roof looking at me, exposing his bright blue genitals,  and then threw the plastic bag down at me. Speaking of blue genitals, to the artist’s eye, they are the most marvellous blue, and the girls in the troop sure love a good set of them. You know sometimes you see a woman (often an academic) wearing blue eye- shadow right up to her eyebrows, like Twiggy did and like Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe from the 60’s, well to me, those are monkey ball eyes. They are the same blue and have the same startling affect when they flash at you. Of course the monkey ones are far more attractive.

When I attended writing groups many years ago, the woman whose home we wrote in, had her doors open to monkeys when she was at home. I remember one day watching them walk in, one behind the other, and then sit in a line on the banister of the sitting room stairs to watch us. I have to admit, my suburban roots did throw up some fear, which soon dissipated as they swaggered past, out into the garden through the sliding glass doors. A friend writing in the garden had her pink-lensed sunglasses (this was the 80’s, pink was in) taken from the table, and the culprit sat in the tree above her head taking some suspicious bites at them and then smelt them and put them close to her eyes and peered through them, not liking the way the world looked though the rose tinted glass. She then threw them into the leaves below. They survived to lessen the glare for my friend for quite a while after the incident and I think she quite liked telling people that those were monkey bites decorating the frame. If you're going to wear rose tinted glasses they might as well have the scars of a little wildness.

We watched each other

Later the troop moved to my bottom garden and some of the youngsters rolled and sprung and tumbled from branches, until the bull male ‘chuck chucked’ at them. They were there for the afternoon, much to the dogs’ dismay.

I remember seeing a vervet’s hands up close once, and feeling a soft but bony finger. They have perfect, dark hands with tinyt palms, and each small finger has a tiny print on it, like a human’s, but finer,  just a tiny sketch upon a finger pad. I wonder if that empty man with his gun would respond if he saw those hands so like his own, holding the flowers and fruit they find in my trees, would he still be so set on removing them from his world. Would it change his attitude or will he be happy to tell his grandchildren, that we once had monkeys, wild, in our gardens? I hope their words of, “Gee, Grandpa, that must have been so cool,” ring out in his vacant head for all eternity.

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.  ~William Shakespeare