We were sitting on a couch in the Broadway shopping centre, quietly minding our own business. Well, okay, I was sitting on a couch and the monkey was trying to extract a lump of chewing gum from the carpet with his fingers. Next time I looked, he was about to bite it out of the carpet.
Just as I separated the monkey from the floor covering, I heard a voice behind me say, "Isn't he cute - you are such a cheeky monkey". I get that all the time in shopping centres, so I am used to it now.
What I am not used to is hearing it from the mouth of a bearded lady. I turned around to find this woman, who was clearly not a full quid, aged maybe 25-30, standing there with more of a beard and moustache than I have. It was a full blown beard, with moustaches curled up ala Bismark.
I managed not to shriek and run out of the place yelling, "The apes have landed and are taking over the planet". Instead, I stayed calm, and encouraged the monkey to do dumb things that would require my full attention, like trying to do a swan dive off the arm of the couch into a nearby rubbish bin - anything so that I did not need to converse with the crazed one.
I don't know why I should be worried - after all, I have been spending my days with someone that can't talk, craps their pants on a regular basis, dribbles, eats with their fingers, sticks pens and keys in their ears, has no idea about personal hygeine and has mad screaming fits on a regular basis. If the monkey was not 16 months old, he'd be pumped full of thorazine and locked in a rubber room.
Anyway, monkey got the hint and did stupid stuff for me, and eventually the bearded one got bored and left to join the circus. Well, actually she walked into Kmart, and struck up a conversation with a shelf of cut price DVD's.
Shopping centres are great when you can just breeze through them, picking up what you want and then splitting at high speed. If you get it right, you don't have to make eye contact with anyone else. I can even do a full trolley shopping trip without so much as glancing at another human - I just use my peripheral vision to stop my trolley from running them over and spend all my time examining the produce on the shelves. It's great - who wants to talk to another human?
It all goes pear shaped when you actually have to stop and sit down in a public place, because public places are frequented by the mad, and there is no escape. These places are also frequented by the elderly, but I quite like talking to them as they are totally captivated by the monkey, and generally half deaf. I can chat with the elderly all day, apart from the ones that try to steal bananas from monkeys. Or the ones that are not deaf, but totally batty.
I think I have a solution though. Monkey loves to push his pram around. I always have to leave the handbrake on to stop him from shooting through behind his pram. He can reach up and grab the handle bars, and he then has enough leverage to push it at a fast walking pace. It must freak people out when they approach from the front because all they see is this pram coming at them with no one driving it (and me running up behind trying to stop it before it plows into someone). He can only push it a few metres if the brakes are on, but now, when I see a nutter, I just release the brake and off we go - off to the other end of the shopping centre where the nutbags are a bit thinner on the ground. He has no sense of course - he tried to run down a cop the other day. That would be good - first driving offence at age 16 months.
All cunning plans though have fatal flaws, and this one involves women. Monkey just loves to show off in front of chicks. I had him pushing the pram like fury the other day - we were making a rapid getaway from a complete drooler. Then he spots this cute girl, possibly all of 14, sitting on a sofa waiting for mum. Monkey goes past her, then hits the brakes and reverses up to give her his winning smile. Once he had her attention, he went forward 10 feet or so (phew, I thought, we were out of there) when he suddenly backs up again and goes back to chuckle at the girl. Then she smiled at him, and I was screwed. He spent the next 5 minutes going back and forth in front of her, showing off what a powerful and attractive monkey he was.
Chicks lap this kind of thing up. I was suddenly more worried about getting into a public custody battle with a clucky 14 year old girl than about having to deal with the gibbering drooler behind us. Te saving grace is that monkeys have shorter attention spans than goldfish - something else eventually caught his eye, and we were off to run over the patrons of a coffee shop.
Note to self - do not buy the monkey a toy, ride on tank for his birthday.
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