CHIMPO'S RESTING PLACE

The old monkey needs to be laid to rest...

Had he still been in the land of the living Chimpo would have appreciated his funeral, if that’s what it was, and those he left behind knew nothing of the concept of funeral.

He wasn’t, of course, aware that he was dead. Nobody has that amount of self-knowledge when the hour for their demise has passed. But no matter: the family of monkeys that had raised him, nurtured him and with whom he had grown old, did.

He had sons, but they were all approaching old age themselves because Chimpo had persisted with the thing called life beyond the normally allotted number of years and drifted into a kind of primeval dotage. So the removal of Chimpo’s remains was left to Chumpo, his grandson and the one who had taken a great deal of delight in kicking him when he was down.

It might seem harsh, kicking an old monkey who was barely aware of the distinction between day and night, what with his faded eyesight and equally faded mind, but it wasn’t so rare in communities of a breed of pre-hominid monkey, now extinct, like Chumpo’s. So Chumpo had cheerfully kicked him.

But he had also listened to the rantings of the geriatric monkey, especially the bits about stars, and it had all set him thinking.

Besides being Chimpo’s kin and having inherited some of Chimpo’s DNA he was a bit of a thinker himself, and he enjoyed nothing more than sneaking out of the family nest once he’d deflowered his sister or his mother (he wasn’t bothered who received his semen, just that someone should, preferably a female), and lying on the green grass in the open, and stare.

He stared at the skies and particularly at the only bits of the skies he could actually see, the stars, and he got it, it being what his grandfather had ranted about.

Chimpo had concluded there must be gods up there, each with his own star, lighting the darkness of night so that their magical eyes could see what was going on on the world down below. And Chumpo understood that. It made a glorious kind of sense, especially as here and there some of the stars seemed to move across the heavens like wandering souls searching for a kind of peace in the chaos that was the milky way, not that he called it the milky way. He wasn’t that sure what milk looked like other than it was something sucked by infants from the hairy teats of their mothers, and he was quite certain that it looked nothing like a sky full of stars.

And there were big bright stars and small dim ones, some so faint that as he grew older and his eyes grew dimmer they would fade from view. But now he was young, and they were all there, a chaos of little lights in cloudless skies.

“We will take Chimpo to where he can see the gods of his,” he grunted at the rest of the family. “We are not hungry, not now in this season of plenty, and anyway it is my belief that he would be tough to eat.”

That was a long speech, guttural and confusing, but the family picked up the gist of it. Then he shocked them. He truly shocked them in a way that nobody had ever shocked a monkey before.

“Chimpo was a great male,” he said.

“What are you saying? What is great?” asked Kunny, the late lamented’s very elderly woman.

He looked at her for the count of two, which was as far as he could go without having to start again to make sure he hadn’t got lost in the chaos of quantifying time.

“If you weren’t too old to be deflowered I’d have you on your back right now,” he grated, showing unexpected respect for her seniority.

“But what is great?” asked Kunny, unperturbed.

Chumpo sighed. “Great is the forest,” he said at last, “and great is the tallest tree. And Chimpo is great. Chimpo is the brightest star out of all in the big arc of the sky.”

“Chimpo is a light?” gasped one of the younger monkeys.

Chumpo thumped him. “Chimpo is the brightest light,” he said, evenly, in their chattery grunting language.

But the thought was so abstract nobody else could understand him, and a couple of youngsters started a game of peepy-bo because everything was way beyond them.

“We take Chimpo to the high place,” concluded Chumpo, knowing where he meant. It wasn’t so much a mountain and barely even a hill, but it was the highest place around and he knew in his heart that Chimpo would be happy there.

“Tomorrow,” he added, balefully.

And so it was the very next day that the slightly smelly corpse of the old family leader was half-dragged, half-carried, out of the nest where they lived, and towards what they looked on by all as the high place.

Chimpo might have been frail in life, and weak with age, but he was no light-weight, and one or two of the youngsters decided to opt out when they started sweating at the effort, and Chumpo had to batter them with sticks until they returned to what he considered to be their duty.

All he said was Chimpo was great and they had to succumb to his orders or maybe be battered to death themselves: Chumpo was known for his temper.

Eventually they arrived at the top of what was little more than a hillock and Chump stood very still, looking around, whilst the family struggled to hold the body they had toiled up the hill with.

Then Chumpo made up his mind. He found a place that was grassy, soft, and without a tree anywhere near so that the least shadow would never fall upon it.

“He will lie here,” he ordered, and the monkeys very carefully laid the body of the revered Chimpo to rest exactly where he pointed.

Then they went away, a little desolate group of monkeys, saddened for a short while by the death of their oldest male until someone started playing tag and the rest joined in.

It was a balmy night by the time they went to sleep and Chumpo lay gazing at the stars and almost thinking. And way up on the high ground where Chimpo lay a wolf got its fill of almost fresh and rather tough meat, and other creatures smelled blood on their air and joined it until there was so little left of Chimpo’s remains that there was nothing worth scavenging, and they melted away.

But next day when Chumpo went there alone he found the bones, slightly scattered, and knew instantly what had happened.

Chimpo’s flesh was gone.

He was up there with the stars, and for a precious moment he was certain, as he gazed into the early morning heavens, that he could just about make out one of the twinkling points of light before it faded into the blue of a new day.

Chimpo was up there, he knew that, and he would never forget.

© Peter Rogerson, 29.10.19