Mr Thundermug. Cornelius Medvei

baboon sighs, cracks another melon seed and begins to scratch his balls.

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      NOBODY ever established where it was that the baboon came from, or what had brought him to this unnatural habitat. The basic facts are confusing – clearly, baboons are not native to this region; but, on the other hand, Mr Thundermug spoke our language perfectly, with no trace of an accent, and there is no evidence that he knew any foreign languages.

      There were in fact numerous theories as to the baboon's origins, but it was impossible to know which, if any, was true; all they had in common was their lack of supporting evidence. This in itself was not surprising, as our city excels in the manufacture of rumours. Nevertheless, the theories I heard were so often attributed, at various removes, to Mr Thundermug himself, that I began to think the baboon must have taken a perverse delight in providing contradictory accounts of his origins – tailored perhaps to his mood and the company.

      There was, for example, the romantic account, in which he and his wife, after a night of love in the open air, had crept away to sleep in a basket which they stumbled on among the dry grasses: it was the basket of a weather balloon that was to be launched the following morning. Their presence went unnoticed at the launch, but once in the air the extra weight of the two baboons drove it off course and instead of going into orbit, as it should have done, the balloon drifted among the clouds until it came to rest somewhere in the vicinity of our city. Then there was the scientific account, according to which the baboon had been created in a laboratory by a renegade professor who stole stuffed animals from museums and brought them to life with a combination of injections and electric shocks.

      Perhaps there was a germ of truth in one of these stories, but if so it was well concealed, and so Mr Thundermug's origins remain a mystery. No one ever mentioned the most obvious explanation, that the baboon and his family had simply escaped from a nearby zoo; in any case, it must be ruled out, since most of the zoos in the district had no baboons in their monkey houses, and the two that did never reported any animals missing.

      The house occupied by the family was much like the others in the street: it had a roof of black tiles, overhanging eaves, shuttered windows and a balcony. An untidy assortment of potted plants softened the lines of the front step. The woodwork needed painting; the place had been empty until the baboons arrived.

      The house was known as Crofty Creek, a name that seemed so odd to me, when I first came across it in a newspaper report, that I was sure it must be a misprint. When I visited the house, though, I saw to the right of the front door a tarnished brass plate bearing the name in capital letters, exactly as spelt in the newspaper. This was odd enough, but I discovered later that the house appears in the records of the City Council only under its number in the street – there is no mention of a name. Perhaps ‘Crofty Creek’ was a name of Mr Thundermug's own invention.

      Of course, there are many empty houses in our city, but I like to think that the baboon chose Crofty Creek out of all the others because of its proximity to a row of banana trees, which grew outside a police station near the east gate of the city. They had been planted on the order of the chief of police, so that on wet days incarcerated criminals could meditate on the sound made by the water battering the huge leaves.

      I imagine the baboons' arrival during one of those violent cloudbursts which are so common here during the summer months: they would have picked their way through the suddenly deserted streets, dismayed by the chilly gusts of spray and the water running round their ankles, until they passed under the banana trees, and the raindrops rattled on the leaves with such a dreadful noise that they were moved to look for shelter. They did not go into the police station itself, which was full of policemen, but into the empty house a little way down the street: this was Crofty Creek.

      As it happens, the house was not only empty but condemned, due to an infestation of cockroaches which nobody had been able to eradicate. But this would not have deterred the baboons: on the contrary, it was a convenient supply of nourishment. As the rain poured down outside there was a terrible noise of stamping and clattering, and the rustling of alarmed cockroaches. Scrambling up the creaking stairs, over the dusty floorboards, the baboons hunted the little insects all over the house, and soon they had collected enough for a substantial meal. They ate squatting on the kitchen table. Then, tired from their journey, their stomachs laden with cockroaches, they crept upstairs and fell asleep in the bath.

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      MORE puzzling even than the question of his origins was the question of how the baboon had learnt to speak. Of course, if we are to believe the claims of Dr Alphonsus Rotz, Mr Thundermug was not the first baboon in natural history to have learnt human speech. In a way, though, his achievement was even more extraordinary, for while the alleged achievements of Dr Rotz were due to his tireless and brilliant tutoring, Mr Thundermug, as far as anyone knows, had no teacher.

      It appears that we are dealing with one of those mysterious upheavals of evolution; a spontaneous kindling of consciousness, in the way a heap of grass clippings will provide the spark to set itself alight. But even this explanation stretches credibility when we consider the size of the leap between the shrieks and grunts of a primate and the polished and unsettling eloquence of Mr Thundermug – it seems closer to the impossible tales of men pulling themselves out of swamps by their own hair.

      Surprisingly, perhaps, given their wildly diverse theories about the baboon's origins, people's accounts of how he learnt to speak are more or less consistent. This does little for their credibility – the explanation still strikes me as profoundly unscientific. In the absence of anything more convincing, however, I have no alternative but to reproduce the prevailing theory in full.

      SOME time after the baboons' arrival at Crofty Creek, the smothering heat of late spring closed over the city. The various street smells, dormant all winter – the smells of drains and sweat and cheap perfume and rotting vegetables – sprang to the nostrils with renewed vigour. The heaps of pineapples at the market stalls were replaced by melons and small hard peaches. Those citizens who were able to leave went away, and those who remained became testy and unpredictable.

      Baboons, of course, are naturally designed for the fierce heat of the savannah. Even so, the male baboon was finding the interior of Crofty Creek uncomfortable – perhaps with his thick mane he felt the heat more than the rest of his family. He had started taking an afternoon nap a little way down the street, under a tree whose dense foliage and spreading branches provided a cool shade even when the sun was directly overhead.

      The tree's location, however, was not ideal: it stood in the grounds of a residential home for the irretrievably insane, which meant that the baboon's rest was frequently disturbed. He would curl up between the roots of the tree, or in the crook of a low branch, and doze, listening with one eye open to the conversations of the patients. Usually they talked among themselves, or to themselves, but sometimes he addressed them directly; he bared his teeth if they came too near.

      At first the baboon would close his watching eye and go back to sleep when he lost interest in the patients' conversations, but as the days passed he listened with increasing restlessness. The hairs along his spine rose like a dog's, his mane bristled and his bottom dyed itself a violent shade of purple. Eventually he would lose his temper altogether, and shake his backside at the patients, or chase them round the garden with savage barks.

      It occurred to me that there might be some value in knowing exactly who spoke to the baboon during these first encounters with humanity – suppose, for example, that one of the patients had provided some vital spur to his acquisition of language? And so I visited the residential home myself to see what I could discover.