The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt Read Online Free PDF Page B

had a pet. Father bought him from the pasar in Singapore, a sweet little monkey, chattery, who when he found he liked you would settle and nestle into you, snuggling in under your arm. I called him Little Clive.
    When Father brought him home and handed him to me that first day, I squealed and let go, and he was up the tree in a flash. There he stayed, peering down at us while sucking on his thumb just as a human baby would. He sat up there for three hours until Father ordered Cook’s boy to shin up the tree and get him down.
    Father said that Little Clive must be tied up after that. So Cook’s boy, Malik, found a long piece of hemp rope, and plaited it to form a neat collar at one end, to slip firmly over Little Clive’s neck. Little Clive couldn’t undo it, eventhough his nimble fingers worried at the rope much of the day. Malik tied the other end to the verandah post. The rope was long enough that Little Clive could run, and even climb the trees closest to the house, but he could only climb so far – not far enough to get himself tangled, nor far enough to climb onto the roof.
    He would sit on the long rail at the front of the verandah and chatter at anyone who passed, like one of the old Chinamen at the pasar . Malik brought bruised fruit from the kitchen. Little Clive would sit and carefully peel the fruit, turning it over and over in his hands then stuffing it piece by piece into his mouth until his cheeks bulged and his eyes almost goggled from his head. At night he would wrap himself in an old sarong – against the mosquitoes, we always thought, but perhaps from watching me swaddle my doll in her blanket and hold her to me like a baby.
    Our garden was full of insects, and among them were bees, swarming and buzzing on their quest for pollen, staying only for an afternoon, a day, then passing on, leaving silence where their humming had been. They could engulf a hibiscus in minutes; the dizzy big plates of scarlet and orange circled our house, each flower with its nodding sticky pistil a syrupy flag of welcome to the bees.
    And poor Little Clive, perched there in the hibiscus with his hands and face and belly all sticky with the juice of mango and pineapple and rambutan and papaya, poor Little Clive was there one day when the bees passed through. And he was on his hemp rope and couldn’t get away when the bees swarmed him. He tried to fight them off, poor thing, he squawked and screamed, he fought with his sharplittle fingernails, but the humming buzzing mass of them settled on him like a cloud.
    Father wouldn’t let me outside, though I screamed for poor Little Clive, but the truth is, I didn’t want to go, not with those buzzing, stinging bees there. We stood inside, safe behind wooden shutters, and watched.
    ‘They will leave,’ Father said. ‘They always do.’
    And Father was right, as Father always was. The bees passed on and left Little Clive as suddenly as they had swarmed him. One moment he was writhing, black and thick with bees; the next, just his thin bee-less self remained, drooping, barely holding on to his perch in the hibiscus, fruit dropped to the ground below him.
    Father opened the front door and we went towards Little Clive. When Father stretched his arms towards him Little Clive screamed. I could see hard, round lumps already forming on the soft skin of his belly, the size and shape of the jade beads Mother wore around her neck. The little monkey scrambled to try to climb higher, away from Father, but the rope tightened around his neck and would let him go no further.
    Father got a mango – a good one, not a bruise on it – and tried to tempt him, but Little Clive just shuddered and shivered at the end of his rope, just barely keeping his balance in the V of the hibiscus branches. Even when night fell, he would not come to us. His little eyes stayed bright and watchful, not letting us close.
    Before I went to bed, I watched Malik put an enamel dish of water and a banana on the ledge of