The Rainbows and the Secrets, Christine Cox [first ebook reader .txt] 📗

1

In trouble again

It was a brilliant puppet show, but it was spoilt for Jamie. Punch was doing something violent to Judy, or the baby, or the policeman; Jamie couldn’t see. As usual they’d put him on the back row, and the boy in front, who’d been fidgeting all the way through the show, was now standing on the bench blocking Jamie’s view. Jamie put his hands on the boy’s shoulders and pushed downwards. The boy toppled off his perch and fell onto the shrieking children on the bench in front of him, banging his knee and howling with exaggerated pain.
Jamie saw Mr Buxton heading in his direction. Two rows in front he saw the long blond hair of his nine-year-old stepsister Ellie, pinned back with that stupid slide with the pink glittery hearts she was so proud of. He watched Ellie’s hand go up. He heard Ellie say: “It was Jamie, sir.” (How did she know? Did the slide have eyes in it?)
Jamie felt himself being propelled out of the school hall and along the corridor to the Head’s room. The Head wasn’t there, so Jamie had to stand in the secretary’s room till she came back. The secretary glared at Jamie and telephoned his father. “I’m sorry Mr Hadfield,” he heard her say, “...yes, in trouble again...Mrs Gupta will want to see you-can you come in at 3.15?”
Dad and the Head arrived at the same time: he heard their voices in the corridor, talking about him. “It’s the second time this week he's been in trouble,” the Head was saying. “I shall have to suspend him.”
As they passed through the secretary’s office to the Head’s room, Mrs Gupta looked crossly at Jamie, and beckoned him to follow. His father looked sad and hopeless. Ellie had tagged along behind, and was waiting in the corridor. She looked smug.
Mrs Gupta asked Jamie why he’d pushed the boy off the bench.
“Don’t know,” replied Jamie. He didn’t bother to explain that he hadn’t meant to push the boy off the bench, only to get him to crouch down so Jamie could see. Nor did he mention that the boy had been a nuisance all afternoon, squirming about, leaning against Jamie’s knees, and getting out of his seat.
No-one ever listened when Jamie explained things. They seemed to think everything was his fault because of his size. He was the biggest boy in the school, in spite of being nine, and two years younger than the Year Sixes. It didn't matter who he complained to when other children teased him: Mr Buxton, or Mrs Gupta, or Dad. Whoever it was would always say, with disbelief: “They picked on you? But you’re the biggest boy in the school, Jamie!”
Jamie was suspended from school for three days.
“You’re the biggest boy in the school, Jamie,” said his father as they walked to the van, “and the worst behaved. Do you realise how many times Mrs Gupta has sent for me this term?”
“It’s four,” said Ellie immediately.
“Is not,” said Jamie.
“Is!” said Ellie. "The first time, you hit someone with a ruler in class. The second time you threw a girl’s sandwich on the floor and trod on it-“
“She spat in my lunchbox!”
“Says you! The third time-"
“Shut up!” yelled Jamie, grabbing a bunch of her long blond hair in each hand and yanking it hard. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

Ellie was screaming. Dad took Jamie’s arms in a vice-like grip and Jamie dropped the hair. Ellie ran sobbing to the van. Dad turned Jamie round to face him, still holding his arms. His father stared at him.
“What is it with you Jamie?” he said. “Are you mad?”
“Mad Jamie! Bad Mad Jamie! Mad Bad Jamie!” called two giggling girls from his class as he climbed into the back of the van, where Dad made him sit among the pipes and toilet bowls and wash basins, while Ellie travelled in the front.
“No television for you tonight,” Dad told him.
On the way home, Dad bought Ellie an ice-cream, to make up for having her hair pulled.

At home, Jamie lay on the captain’s bed in what he called his “cupboard”. This was an exaggeration, but his bedroom wasn’t much bigger than a walk-in closet. The captain’s bed consisted of a top bunk, with some shelves and drawers underneath instead of a bottom bunk. It took up the whole of one of the longer walls. The opposite wall was only three-quarters of a metre away, so there was just room for a bunk ladder, and for Jamie to get in and out of bed, but for no other furniture. On one end wall of the narrow room was a small window; on the other, a sliding door, because there wasn’t enough space for an ordinary door to open. The bunk was too short for him and as he lay on his front, his feet stuck out uncomfortably over the end rail. From the lounge came the sound of Ellie laughing at the television.
Jamie took out the mobile phone Dad had given him a few days earlier, for his birthday. He wondered where his mother was, and how surprised she would be if she had a phone call from her son. Maybe she would be overcome with joy and rush over from the other side of the world and take him back to live with her. Or maybe she had twelve other children now and would say: “It’s lovely to talk to you Jamie but I’ve got my hands full at the moment. Call me back in ten years.” Jamie didn’t have her phone number.
He dialled his grandparents’ number instead. He heard Gran’s voice on the answerphone say; "Sorry, we can’t come to the phone just now...,” and remembered they were on holiday abroad somewhere. There was no-one to phone. What was the use of a phone if you had no-one to talk to? He banged the back of the phone against the metal end-bar of the bunk. How many bangs would it take for the screen to break? Jamie banged it again harder, then a third time, harder still. The screen was still unbroken. He stopped because it was too noisy. If he carried on banging some-one would come to see what was happening. Risking one last noise, he threw the phone at the wall opposite his bed, expecting it to bounce off and hit the floor with a clatter. No clatter came. The phone sailed through the wall and landed with a faint thud, somewhere beyond it. Jamie stared. The phone had gone through the wall.
The paper on this wall showed monkeys of many different colours – all the colours of the rainbow in fact- sitting in trees, eating, or swinging from one tree to the next. Multi- coloured parrots flew here and there, and near the floor some blue hippos basked on a muddy bank. It was different from the wall against which his bed rested. On that wall, although the hippos were similar, the trees were different and the parrots were just plain green. The monkeys were a dull green colour too, and so hidden in the trees that you had to look hard to see them. Jamie had often wondered why the two walls were different.
As he stared, he noticed a red monkey, right opposite him. He was surprised to see that the red monkey looked the way he, Jamie, felt: angry. It was staring at something, frowning and baring its teeth. It was a comfort to Jamie that someone else seemed to feel as angry as he did. Jamie liked this monkey.
The next thing that happened was stranger still. As Jamie was observing the monkey, the monkey shifted its gaze, and looked straight at Jamie. “What are you staring at?” it snapped.
Jamie gasped. “I was looking for my phone and - and you’re angry like me,” he started to explain, “I was just wondering why...Anyhow,” he added, getting his breath back, “why shouldn’t I stare at you if I want to? You’re on my wallpaper!”
Before the monkey could reply there was a sudden noise of rustling leaves and creaking branches, and an orange shape flashed by. The orange monkey – for that was what it was – landed on the branch of a mango tree, grabbed a fruit and began to gobble it greedily. As it did so, Jamie heard a snarl, and saw the red monkey launch itself from its perch, hurtle through the air and land with such force on the same mango branch that several fruits fell to the ground. It continued to shake the branch violently, as if to shake the orange monkey off it, snarling the while. The orange monkey retreated to a fork in the tree trunk, still clutching the mango. Once there, to Jamie’s further amazement, it turned as red as its opponent, snarled back and crouched ready to pounce.
The monkeys were going to hurt each other. Jamie had to stop them. He knelt on the bunk, stretched out his arms and grasped something solid that felt like a tree branch. It seemed as if a window had opened in the wall. He pushed his head through, and pulled the rest of him after it. It wasn't a very big window: he had to wriggle and squirm his way through. Then suddenly he was on the other side, hanging by his arms from a tree, his feet dangling. He felt anxiously around for a foothold, and found one.
He was in a tree, standing on one branch and holding on to another. The two red monkeys were either side of him: only now they were no longer red, but shocking pink. The air felt hot and damp, and his ears were filled with the squawking of parrots, the screeches of monkeys, the buzzing of insects, the rustling of leaves and the creaking of branches, as the tree swayed alarmingly in the wind. The ground was a dizzyingly long way below.


2

Monkey business

The bright pink monkeys had stopped snarling and were staring up at Jamie. But then they started to make another alarming noise - sort of half-panting, half-coughing - and turned yellow.
“You change colour!” exclaimed Jamie.
The panting-cough got louder and more violent, and then stopped as the monkeys ran out of breath. They were both apple green now.
“Don’t you change colour?” asked the first monkey.
“No,” said Jamie. “not much, anyway.”
“Then how does anybody know how you feel?” asked the second monkey.
Jamie had never thought about this before, and it was hard to concentrate, clinging to a swaying tree. Before he could come up with an answer, the first monkey snapped suspiciously: “You’re not one of those Secrets are you?”
“What secrets?”
“Doesn’t matter.” This monkey had a very short attention span. “Give it a mango Tufts,” he said to the other monkey, who had two tufts of hair sticking up on the top of her head. “See if it eats mango.”
Jamie ate the mango with difficulty, keeping a tight hold of the branch at the same time, juice running down his chin and neck onto his shirt. Watching him, the two monkeys started the noise again. Jamie realised they were laughing!
“You’re a weird sort of monkey, mate, that’s for sure,” gasped Tufts as she got her breath back. “He’s the weirdest monkey I’ve ever seen. How about you Snapper?” she addressed her companion.
“I’m human,” explained Jamie, and for some reason this sent the monkeys