The Dinner Date

The Dinner Date

 I had lunch with a monkey once. It wasn’t planned, it was just one of those chance meetings, like when you dine for one in a café where the tables are so close together you feel as if, by the end of the meal, you know the person on the table next to you, how they eat, how they drink, how they dab at their mouth with their napkin, how they smile as thoughts pop into their head that no one else can see, and at the end, when one of you rises to leave, you feel you should arrange another time to meet or say ‘nice to see you’ just as you would with a friend. Well, that’s what it was like for me and the monkey. Except it wasn’t in a cramped café but on the balcony of a hotel in The Gambia, and we weren’t nibbling at neat little sandwiches or sipping Italian coffee, rather I was savouring the last remnants of sweating cheese and bread I had saved from the complimentary breakfast and he was sucking on a small green banana with his great elastic lips.

We sat in silence, occasionally swapping testing glances and making the smallest of movements to settle ourselves into the comfort of each other’s company. I noticed how his fur shone green in the spotted sunlight that filtered through the trees above us and thought it must be oily. No doubt he thought the same of me as I had yet to shower and could feel my hair clinging to the mouldings of my scalp and becoming increasingly limp and pathetic in the gathering African heat. I suddenly felt self-conscious and raised a hand to fluff it a little. The monkey watched my action with mild curiosity. His banana was almost finished, as was my bread and cheese, and I felt a little sad as we eliminated the last morsels in unison. I looked at him, unsure of how best to finish our meeting, of the correct etiquette when dining with a monkey. He seemed less concerned and simply discarded the unwanted banana skin on the tiled balcony floor, transferred his weight from his haunches to his feet and leapt into the branches of the overhanging tree without so much as a backward glance. I stared at the abandoned banana skin and felt used.

Then the ants came.