Monkey Mountain Page 8

  Splash! The second submachine gun fell into the sea.

  Pirate Boy’s uncle howled in pain. His wrist was caught. It was being crushed.

  I leapt forward, put both hands on the pirates’ boat and pushed for all I was worth. Siti’s father came rushing to help. We both pushed. Slowly the gap widened and the pirate’s arm came free. The wrist was swelling up quickly, and already turning black and blue. I didn’t know if it was broken, but it must have been very painful. The pirate screwed up his face in agony as Siti’s father and I lifted him back into the boat. We gently sat him on a squashed roll of carpet.

  Siti called out in Malaysian. Her father turned his head and I saw his body stiffen. I looked to see what was happening.

  Shishkebab!

  While we’d been helping his uncle, Pirate Boy had found the pistol.

  ‘Put your hands up,’ he said.

  Siti’s father and I did as we were told. You don’t argue with a gun-toting pirate. But this pirate was only fourteen or fifteen years old. He looked scared and confused.

  ‘Put the pistol down,’ I said.

  The boy shook his head.

  ‘I saved your life,’ I reminded him.

  ‘You kicked my uncle,’ the boy said. ‘Because of you his arm is hurt.’

  We both looked at his uncle. The pirate leader sat slumped forward with his head resting on his knees, cradling his injured wrist against his chest. Occasionally he groaned.

  ‘He needs to go to hospital,’ I said. I looked over at Mr Griffin, asleep in the makeshift bed Siti and her mother had arranged for him. ‘So does my teacher.’

  ‘The police will arrest me.’

  ‘You’re only a boy.’

  ‘I am a pirate,’ he said.

  I looked him in the eye. ‘I’ll tell the police you helped us. I’ll tell them you saved my teacher.’

  He frowned. ‘I have not saved your teacher.’

  ‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘But you could.’

  The boy thought about it for a few moments. Then he stepped forward and handed me the pistol.

  ‘Our boat is fast,’ he said. ‘I will take your teacher to hospital.’

  24

  MONKEY BOY

  The boy was right. The pirates’ big black speedboat was really fast. We reached the town on the peninsula in half an hour.

  We would have got there quicker, but first we had to transfer all Siti’s family’s stuff back to their boat. I found a roll of banknotes hidden in the speedboat’s cabin. Assuming it was stolen, like everything else on the boat, I gave the money to Siti’s father to buy another motor scooter. He thanked me and shook my hand.

  ‘Sama-sama,’ I said.

  Siti thanked me, too. And her mother gave me a tiny mother-of-pearl brooch in the shape of a hornbill.

  ‘It is the special bird of Borneo,’ Siti explained. ‘It will bring you good luck.’

  I pinned it to my T-shirt. Good luck always comes in handy.

  Before saying goodbye, I showed Siti where the loris was hiding in the coil rope. I asked her to set it free when they reached land.

  ‘Be careful it doesn’t bite you,’ I said.

  Siti nodded seriously, then gave me a mischievous look. ‘You be careful, too, Monkey Boy.’

  Monkey Boy! I guess they did find me in a boat full of monkeys. I smiled.

  ‘My name’s Sam,’ I said.

  ‘Selamat jalan, Sam,’ Siti said, as I stepped aboard the pirates’ boat.

  ‘Selamat jalan,’ I responded.

  Pirate Boy touched my arm. ‘You supposed to say, “Selamat tinggal”,’ he said softly.

  ‘Selamat tinggal!’ I called, and Siti’s family waved back.

  At first I was nervous about being alone with the pirates, but they gave me no trouble. The boy’s uncle was only interested in getting to hospital. The other man seemed badly shaken from his experience with the macaques and did everything I told him. He didn’t understand English, but all I had to do was pretend I was going to throw another banana to him (the macaques were all watching) and point at what I wanted him to do. And Pirate Boy was so helpful I almost forgot he’d been part of the gang. He kept an eye on Mr Griffin when I was busy, filled a big bowl with water for the monkeys, and even got me a bottle of soft drink and two packets of biscuits from the pirates’ food supply.

  One more thing delayed us getting to the peninsula. We had to stop along the way and pick up a passenger.

  Grumpy was tired from all his swimming and seemed quite happy to climb aboard when we pulled up next to him. He was even pleased to see the macaques, judging by the way he squeezed in among them on the speedboat’s crowded foredeck. The monkeys seemed to like it there, with their faces in the wind as we powered across the bumpy green sea.

  In the end, we didn’t stop at the peninsula town. Pirate Boy reckoned it would be quicker to go around the peninsula and travel up the Sarawak River to Kuching, where the hospital was. It was also where our school group had stayed for the last three nights. I hoped they had gotten back safely and not been cut off by the volcano.

  The volcano was no longer visible once we rounded the peninsula, but the sky was full of smoke and every so often I got a whiff of sulphur in the air. The smell made me shudder.

  Volcanoes suck, I thought.

  We made one final stop before Kuching. I asked the boy to steer us close to shore on a bend where the jungle came right to the river’s edge. As the boat nosed into the shallows, I tossed two big bunches of bananas ashore. The macaques went after them like … well, like macaques after food of any kind. They are very greedy monkeys.

  The bananas didn’t interest Grumpy, but the trees did. Just along from the scene of the macaques’ latest feeding frenzy we drew level with a stretch of mangrove trees. As the boat swung past them, Grumpy bunched his long back legs and launched himself like a giant frog. He sailed four metres through the air, wrapped one long hand around a branch, hooked his tail around another, and went swinging off through the trees.

  I hoped he would like his new home.

  25

  ROCK STAR

  Mr Griffin and I were famous. The eruption of Mount Bako had made headlines right around the world. And when news got out that a schoolboy and his teacher from Australia had made a miraculous escape, everyone wanted to interview us. But Mr Griffin was recovering in hospital and couldn’t do interviews. So I was it.

  At first, Mrs Dalton tried to shoo the reporters away from our hotel. She told them I was exhausted and that I was too young to give interviews without my parents’ permission. But the news crews had come from all over the world. They wouldn’t go away. They kept knocking on our doors, phoning our rooms from the hotel lobby, trying to get photos from the roofs and balconies of neighbouring buildings.

  ‘This is so cool,’ said Kirk, who was sharing a room with me. He opened the curtain and waved, and about fifty big camera lenses swivelled in our direction. ‘It’s like we’re rock stars.’

  It was kind of cool. But it was also annoying. I couldn’t go out! Nor could Kirk or any of the others. The reporters were hungry for a story. Anyone who looked like an Australian schoolkid got mobbed as soon as they stepped into the street.

  We hadn’t came all the way to Kuching, Borneo, to be trapped like prisoners in a hotel.

  I phoned my parents, and Dad came up with an idea.

  ‘Do a press conference,’ he said.

  Mrs Dalton set it up. The hotel let us use their function room. I sat behind a table on a small stage and about 200 journalists filled the rows of seats facing me. There was a PA system and six microphones.

  I did feel like a rock star.

  The press conference went for half an hour. I don’t remember much about it. The camera flashes dazzled me and there were more questions than I can recall. But my brother Nathan taped the tiny bit of it that appeared on Australian television. Here’s how it goes:

  TV journalist: Is it true that you single-handedly captured a gang of pirates and deli
vered them to the police in Kuching?

  Me, shaking my head: No. I had a bit of help from some monkeys. And it wasn’t exactly a gang – there were only two pirates and a boy. The police let the boy go.

  TV journalist: At any stage were you in fear for your life?

  Me, taking a sip of water: All the time.

  TV journalist: And yet you stayed to help your teacher after the rest of your party ran to safety.

  Me, looking thoughtful…

  That’s it. The clip ends there. They don’t show my response to the journalist’s last question. I told him that I didn’t stay to help my teacher, he stayed to help me. And I told the journalist how it started – how the macaques took Stephanie’s backpack and I got stuck while trying to get it back.

  ‘So you risked your life for this girl’s backpack?’ the reporter said.

  ‘She thought her passport was in it,’ I explained.

  Luckily, nobody at the press conference asked about Stephanie’s passport. Because when I finally saw Stephanie again, and handed over her battered pink backpack, I had some bad news.

  ‘The passport isn’t in there. I think the pirates lost it.’

  Stephanie just laughed. ‘Silly me, I made a mistake – my passport was in my jacket, back on the bus. Hey, but thanks for rescuing my backpack.’

  ‘Sama-sama,’ I replied.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Stephanie asked.

  ‘Your phrasebook’s in there.’ I pointed at the backpack that had nearly cost me and Mr Griffin our lives. ‘Look it up.’

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