Monkey and Me Read Free Page A

football because of circumstances. Thirteen is an unlucky number and there are thirteen letters in that word – and it seems to me that circumstances are never really that good. So on sports day my circumstances allow me to run home and sneak into Dad’s shed.
    He’s brilliant at everything. He was a very careful long-distance lorry driver and he’s a well-liked postie who keeps an eye on elderly people when he delivers mail. He might be brilliant at everything he does, but no one’s told him that he’s not so brilliant at DIY. In fact he’s rubbish, that’s the truth. When he tried to decorate the house last year we had more wallpaper left over than the Dead Sea Scrolls, or so Mum said.
    And another thing: Dad never throws anything out. You never know when you might need something again, he always tells Mum. Then she insists he puts whatever it is in the shed. Where no one goes except him. And me.
    I had to tell the world about Sweet Dreams SweetFactory and thanks to Dad’s hoarding and all those rolls of wallpaper I had everything I needed. I was going to make a banner big enough to be seen from space, though I doubted that anyone up there in the international space station would be looking down just at the right time.
    It took me a while to saw the broom handle in half with Dad’s small handsaw and then tack each end of the wallpaper roll onto the two halves. Then I needed a long corridor to unroll my banner. And Dad’s shed isn’t even big enough to swing a cat in – or so he says – so I took it in the house and unrolled it in the hall. I got marker pen ink on me, the walls and Mum’s beige carpet. She wouldn’t be pleased if she noticed, and it would be hard to miss because where I’d gone over the edge of the paper looked like crows’ feet had walked in ink and staggered up the hall. But once she knew I’d done exactly what Dad had always told me, then I doubted that she’d throw a wobbly.
    He’s always said we have to be brave. I don’t know why, because we don’t have rampaging elephants coming down the street, there are no cobras in the garden and the nearest motorway is miles away.As long as you can outrun Peacock’s Feather there’s nothing really to worry about around here. I think maybe he meant school and the other kids. But I’m not sure. He never said. And when I asked him why I had to be brave he didn’t seem too sure, but then said we shouldn’t be scared.
    I didn’t know I was.
    So, everything was going to plan until I got to the top floor of Sweet Dreams Sweet Factory. Some of the big earth-moving machines were at the back of the building and there was brick dust everywhere. Every time one of the JCBs whacked the building with its mutant-crab-like arm, the whole place shuddered. The stairwells were still okay and luckily the breeze came through all those windows we’d broken and blew fresh air inside, which stopped the dust from choking me. I think my timing was a bit out. I didn’t think my protest was going to save the building.
    I got to the edge and climbed out onto the old fire-escape. Then I unfurled the wallpaper roll for the whole world to see. It dangled like a banner from a high-street shop when they have a sale, but my banner didn’t say ‘Everything Must Go 50%Off’; mine said ‘SAVE SWEET DREAMS SWEET FACTOR’.
    Sometimes when I write an essay I run out of space on the edge of the page and I have to break the word up and carry on the next line. Well, I ran out of space with my banner. I couldn’t fit the Y in. But I didn’t have another line to go on. So people are either going to think I can’t spell or won’t know what Factor it is we should be trying to save. Some might be bright enough to know I ran out of paper.
    I waited an hour but no one turned up to see my protest and it’d gone very quiet. I thought the demolition men had