SALLY HAMPTON'S UNCLE

What a change of direction...

Sally Hampton couldn’t help it. She stared at the monkey … or was it a chimp? And it was looking back at her through huge brown eyes and knew she should be afraid, but she wasn’t. There was something about that face, hairy and, she supposed, primitive, that she knew she should want to run as fast as she could away from, but instead here she was hugging the animal as if it was a cuddly toy and she a three year old.

She’d had a cuddly toy, once, and loved it, and this creature he was holding on to like grim death reminded her of it.

She had suffered a dreadful two days since she had found herself mysteriously (or was it magically?) whisked to this dreadful forest with its wild animals and fierce insects and birds, its uncontrolled wilderness, everything that she found so threatening.

It was all uncle Colin’s fault. She’d never liked him and the way he’d been the self-described custodian of secrets. He’d told her often enough as if it was a secret they shared, that he knew things that nobody else knew and if he told the rest of the world then everyone would know and the cat would be out of the bag. She’d never known anything about the kind of cats and bags that he was on about but he said it in the sort of way that suggested she was on the verge of being privy to something huge and that only he and she out of all the millions of people on Earth were.

Then, two days ago, he’d got drunk.

At least, she thought it was two days ago though she was on the brink of losing all sense of time. She didn't like this forest. In fact, she hated everything about it except for this monkey with its warm smelling fur and its big brown eyes.

But she had run away from Uncle Colin when he was supposed to be looking after her, though why she, a thirteen year-old and very clever (she was told) girl should need someone like Uncle Colin to look after her she didn’t know. She’d protested, of course she had, but like every time her protests fell on deaf ears.

“He’ll only be there in case anything goes wrong,” her mother, a teacher at the comprehensive school in town, has said, without suggesting what that anything might be.

It was one of those awkward times when her own school, the expensive private one in the town, had different holidays to those her mother’s school had. And her father, well, he was in the church-yard and good riddance. He was uncle Colin’s brother and just as terrifying, and when he’d been killed on a race track a couple of years earlier whilst trying to break some kind of record, she’d prayed for the one and only time in her life and thanked a god she didn’t believe in for the mercy of his death.

Then Uncle Colin had swallowed something he said to her would show he was really quite a nice man, and slowly become drunk in an unpleasant and very talkative way. She knew that’s what it was because the man next door did it every weekend. The difference was, the man next door made you giggle and Uncle Colin sent horrible tingles through your body when he said stuff no grown up should say to an imaginative girl of thirteen.

“I know what we can do,” he had said, “we can go to see the pyramids in Egypt, together so you won’t be afraid, but not as they are now, all old and weathered, but as they were when they were being built. I’ve been there, been the guest of the pharaohs that they were being build to entomb when they died, broken bread and sipped their wine… it was fun, and I’ll take you if you like. I’ll even introduce you to the odd pharaoh. You’d like that.”

The problem wasn’t so much the Pharaoh bit but her imagination. She knew things about history, after all, her mother was a history teacher, and she knew that the pharaohs that he was talking about had been dead for so long they’d have been dust by now of they hadn’t been embalmed.

When he’d seen the way she frowned at his offer he took another sip of whatever it was he was drinking, and this time when he spoke there was a hint of a slur in his voice, confirming that he was drunk as a skunk, as mother put it when she was sneering at their neighbour from behind the curtain.

“I know then, dahling doubting Tomasena,” he had said, “I could take you on a much longer journey than that … we could go right back to Adam and Eve and the garden of Eden and see the sherpent and lishten to its tempting little words as Eve munshed on a roshey red apple...”

And then he had pounced towards her, his face one great leering drunken and unpleasant grin, and she had run away from him.

Her mother had told her about men like that and the last thing she wanted was for him to lay a single finger in her.

Mother had even suggested to her what men like that might try to do to her, and she didn’t want any of it.

Somehow, she was never able to explain afterwards how it happened, but she ended up charging into her uncle’s laboratory with him lurching behind her, to where he conducted his experiments, and there was his special chair, the one he’d shown her when he’d rambled on about other places he might take her one day, and her uncle was still just behind her making the sort of sounds decent uncles don’t make.

“I could take you to shee...” he had spluttered as he reached one greasy hand towards her, but he never said what he might take her to see because in the twinkling of an eyelid he was gone, the laboratory was gone, the big chair she’d flung herself on, everything, even the strange knob her fingers had enclosed for safety, especially that, was gone.

And instead, here she was in the nightmare of a forest with a brown eyed monkey looking at her curiously and gently, very gently, running his fingers through her long blond hair, and what was that? Was he smiling at her?

© Peter Rogerson 12.11.19