Green Monkey Dreams Page 5

  People still marry if they can find someone to perform the ceremony, though love died long ago. Married or not, a few even have children.

  But the thing is that nothing is connected to anything else.

  Once when I was a small boy, a teacher dissected a frog. In those days there was a law that said you had to go to school; and a frog is a small amphibious creature that lived in waterways when they could sustain life. I was not worried until the teacher inserted a pin into the creature’s brain and ran a mild electric current along the pin. The frog’s legs began to kick ferociously and I screamed at the teacher to stop. The teacher assured me that the frog was dead, but its leg nerves were simply stimulated by the current. The nerves did not know the frog was dead because they thought that the electrical stimulus was a message from the brain to jump. He reminded me that chickens could run even after their heads were chopped off. In those days, chickens did not hatch and die in cages. They had legs and beaks and eyes and they could run about.

  This world is like the frog or the chicken that runs even though it has no head. It is dead, but it does not know it yet.

  That this apartment building survived suggests that no one thought it worth destroying. Its walls are blackened with ancient machine filth, and the rooms are small and squalid. Rats inhabit the basement in droves, making the odd expedition upwards. Yet despite all of these things, it is always fully occupied. It collects human detritus as a grate collects fermented leaves. A certain sort of people come to live here. Those of us who are closest to the bitter end of everything. Refugees from politics, still twitching in its death throes, or people hiding from blackmarketeers paid to kill them, people who have cheated their Facilitators. All seem borne on the muddy tides of chance: refugees, drunks, slatterns and lesser vermin in search of a hole to hide in.

  In a decaying world, this is a graveyard.

  Yet at the same time this street is a small but powerful eddy in the great tides of the world. Things seem to be drawn here by invisible undercurrents which have their own hidden purposes. Events of significance occur here, things happen, which reflect and even change the wider world. From my window, I am watching the end of the world. Nothing will stop it now. It has gone too deep.

  Just the same, it seems to me that this boy’s arrival presages an Event. I squint to see him better and what I do not see my inner eye conjures.

  The pupils of his too-big eyes are charcoal-hued, but there is the faintest hint of grey at the centre; a flaw as subtle as a wisp of cloud on a dark night. His face is finely textured and smooth, but sickly in its very purity: pale, as if he has lived his life under the moon like some midnight-blooming flower.

  It came to me all at once that this pallid moony boy has been brought here by his mother to die. He is thin as a stick insect, his great nodding head too heavy for the thin stalk of his neck and body. His legs are frail and spindly, poking out like sticks from the wide bottoms of his shorts. A few strands of hair float up from the dark damped-down mass on top of his head.

  He looks across the street, his eyes coming directly to my window.

  The breath snags in my throat, for though he cannot possibly see me, I feel his awareness of me like the touch of a wet hand on my belly. His gaze conjures up my granny who said in a hot fierce whisper that death bestows strange powers on those drawing near to it. She told me that in the old land an age ago, sitting up in her bed. I was then a boy, slurping tea and dreams from my mother’s saucer. I know that sweet green land was among the first to go, destroyed utterly when it was used as a killing ground between two greater powers. It had been ravished too hard and for too long. Yet I dream that green things still grow there: where in my youth they called children with that fey look ‘changelings’, and everyone recognised them and treated them carefully.

  Once my granny gripped my chin and told me I was the hope of the future. ‘Hope you are,’ she hissed. ‘The hope of us who are dying.’

  I sense this boy staring up at my window has not been treated carefully but there is an air of power crackling about him. Can he be hope now? Surely hope died with the red-haired girl and her honey mouth. But if not hope, then what is he that comes among us?

  His gaze shifts at last, running slowly along the walls of my apartment house, as if he can see through the grimy facades and their layer of angry graffiti to the squalid little worlds behind them. So must the angel visiting the Evil City have looked about him, intent and fearless. Then I remember another man with such a look.

  It was in the old country. A young priest, new to our troubled district, visited. The call took us all by surprise, my older brothers fighting and screeching like a pack of mongrel dogs trying to decide who was top dog, my sister in her oldest gown with her hair half up and half down and me locked between my mother’s thighs as she wielded scissors and a comb. I had not seen the priest before and his black flapping cloak frightened me. I began to bawl in terror, and my da came in from the porch carrying his paper. He stared first at me, then at the priest, before patting at me and saying, ‘Whisht, lad.’

  The priest had stared at our home, curious and fascinated, for he had come from a rich city family. He did not quail at the grubby, noisy disorder any more than the boy below flinches from the ugliness of this street where his mother has brought them. The likes of the boy and that young priest, who must surely have perished in the Anti-Religion wars, do not expect to find a place that fits them. They are fearless in their solitary strangeness.

  The boy’s mother climbs out of the taxi at last. She is a complete contrast to him, all guile and sharp angles with a shrewd, foxy little face and a way of holding herself that makes her stomach protrude grotesquely. There is nothing of her in the boy’s face and one would not think of her as his mother at all, except that her hand hovers longingly over his shoulder for a moment.

  Only as they turn from the taxi towards the building across the street does it occur to me that they are the new tenants, and I who have lost the capacity for surprise, am surprised. The building opposite is in terrible condition – much worse than this one. There are only four habitable apartments in the half-derelict complex. Three have been occupied continually since soon after I came. These days, a young woman lives in the left, lower-storey flat. In appearance she reminds me of my sister, dead these long years. Mary was one of the first to refuse Renewal. She was called a fanatic in a time where people had enough energy for zealotry.

  ‘It is going to get worse,’ she told me before she died. ‘No one will stand against it. No one will see and say what they see. Even I do not dare so much. I close my eyes and pray, but prayers are not enough. One must have the courage to speak out. There is no courage left in the world and I hate sad endings.’

  The young woman in the building over the road has the same frightened eyes as my sister, and I know that she sees as well. That is partly because she is little more than a child herself, despite the paint she uses to disguise it. She lives alone and has no callers, no Facilitator protector. I have long watched her from this window and it seems to me there is a mystery about her that is unresolved. I have seen her coming home at dusk, hands folded across her breasts and her face saturated with pain. I cannot guess where she has been or what has been happening to give her such a look. She never goes out at night and I have speculated that her pain is caused by some sort of treatment. The hospital opens in day hours. Or, more likely, I am preoccupied with death and try to glue all the ragged bits I see together with that dark unguent.

  The other ground-floor apartment has only recently been vacated. Its last occupant wore an overall and answered the factory siren’s call each morning. My neighbour thinks there was a mishap where he worked. The rate of accidents in factories where they use the old machinery is such that a person wanting to commit suicide would be more certain of success by taking a factory job than in jumping off a bridge. Nothing is replaced and everything is old and failing. The machinery they use is lethal with rust and mishandling.

 
The only occupied flat upstairs has had the same tenant for many years. He arrived soon after I did. I have never seen his face, for he only comes out in the darkest hours. The door opens, and at first it seems the wind has blown it ajar. Then he slips out, a big misshapen shadow laboriously forging a path. Though I cannot see his features, I see by the way he walks that he is old. He puts his feet down carefully as if his bones are brittle and mend uneasily, like inferior solders. He does not like the daylight. His blinds are always closed and I imagine the dimness behind them must be as thick and brown as old syrup with him wading through it slowly.

  The other upper flat has been vacant since a woman and two children were killed there, axed by an unknown assailant. I was in hospital when they found the bodies. One of the aides, seeing the address on my papers, told me of it. I remember she spoke of my home and the street in the past tense, as if I would not be going back there. Ironically, I was discovered to be suffering from the lung blight they once called cancer. The Renewal Vaccine could not deter its ravenous progress.

  ‘The beast killed the babies,’ I told her, half lost in febrile memories after they operated to remove the corrupted lung.

  The aide shook her head pityingly, for she thought my mind had wandered from itself. ‘It was a man who killed them. They think it was a neighbour but there is not enough proof for a conviction. Everyone claims they saw nothing. It must have been some sort of maniac.’

  I nodded, but she did not understand the beast is a creature born out of and within ordinary men and women. It makes them stalk the night as murderers and torturers and hides behind their ordinary faces.

  I have known the beast was in the world since I overheard my mother tell my sister that her grandfather had a beast in him. He was a thin, stooped man with slitted eyes and dreadful long hands with all the fingers the same length. I had never liked him but he was still just a man. My mother’s words made me realise I shrank from him because the beast was inside his skin, hidden behind his human-seeming face.

  I was never afraid of the dark after that, because I understood the beast did not have to hide in cupboards or dark cellars. There were better places to lurk.

  At my first confession, in a lather of terror, I told the young priest I meant to kill the beast which had taken possession of my grandfather. I would fling a canister of stolen holy water on it. I did not want to admit my plans, but eternal damnation for murder seemed less fearsome than bursting into flame for making a bad confession. But the priest had only shaken his head.

  ‘An admirable if fierce aim, my boy. But that beast will not be so easy to kill without killing your grandfather as well,’ he said gently and rather cryptically.

  • • •

  I have often wondered if the long-term inhabitant of the upstairs apartment in the opposite building was disturbed by memories of the old violence across the hall from him. After all, they took him and questioned him for hours, thinking he was the culprit. Had he seen the person who did it? A yellow glint in his eye, the hint of a claw in his words? And what of that night of blood? The walls in all of the buildings are as thin as paper, so the man upstairs must have heard the screams and shrieking of the babies. Why had he not intervened?

  In my mind’s eye, I saw him cowed in terror hearing it all. He could not fight the beast. He closed his eyes and pretended he was deaf and blind.

  Lying in the hospital in an amniotic fugue of morphine just after the murder, I thought of my vow that I would kill the beast when I grew up. I had not realised that as an adult I would no longer see him. He came into me as sweetly as honey melts into toast.

  I did not even know he had been there, until those occasions when he abandoned me, having sated himself on my depravity. It was then I realised he was trapped in me, and henceforth I relished my decay. If the beast had me, I would rush to my end but it is long in coming. Much longer and sadder than I imagined. In the beginning, I prayed that one would come who would name the beast in me. I felt if someone saw him in me, then I could fight him, and drive him from me and the world.

  But no one saw.

  The second-storey flat has been empty for a long time because of the murder. The aide told me there was blood from one end of the apartment to the other, and that the wallpaper was soaked in it. The murderer had chased the woman from room to room. There were handmarks all over the place. The blood had been cleaned away but that kind of thing makes it virtually impossible to rent a place. Of course the agents tried to hide the history under a coat of paint, but the old violence had left indelible prints in the air that could not be painted over. To begin with, the To Let sign was changed regularly to stop prospective tenants realising the apartment had lain fallow for so long, and asking why. Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies – that is the way of salesmen and agents and men, my granny told me.

  Watching the boy and his mother mount the steps to enter the building opposite, I imagine them stopping to examine the foyer with its mouldy red carpet winding up half-rotted stairs. Then they turn into the ex-factory-worker’s room. Perhaps they find a few grease-stained rags and some empty State Beer cans. Maybe even a letter or two chewed to lace by rat embroiderers. Any minute the mother will hurry the boy out to the waiting taxi with disgusted grimaces. There has been a mistake, she will say.

  But they do not come out and after a moment, the taxi glides away. The removal van arrives. Men bring furniture in. They are sullen and careless. They do not understand why anyone would bother bringing furniture here. They heave and grunt as they unload the van, and then they rest before shifting everything inside. The furniture is finely made and expensive. From the crude identity tattoos, I see the removalists were once police troopers. They shake their heads as if they recognise the incongruity of this pair coming here. At one point, the mother appears to be having an argument with the van driver. I imagine him trying to tell her she should go somewhere else. This is no place for the child or you. This is a bad area.

  Where is there a place for us that is not bad? she must respond, if she would speak the truth. She points insistently to the apartment, and the rest of the furniture is brought in.

  After a week, the newcomers have settled into a routine which suits me very well. If the day is fine, the boy is let outside late in the morning. He plays there quietly on the step until his mother whisks him inside when the factory sirens announce the disgorgement of their staff. The mother never leaves the house except to go to the barter market. On those occasions, she locks the boy inside.

  The beast cannot help but stir at the thought of him in there alone.

  I let the sickness come into me for a while then to weaken the beast, for even now it is capable of striking out. How long I am ill, I cannot tell, except that when I return to my senses, there are several pails of milk gone rancid on the step. The landlord bangs on the door and asks am I alive and do I need an ambulance. He is annoyed because he thinks I should get Renewed or go to one of the Gentle Death vans and get my dying over and done with. I am well, I croak, but that is a lie. I am better but I toss in my bed, longing for release. Tenacious, I drift in and out of memories of the old green country. The boy gazes at me from the eye of a fox I once exchanged stares with, when I was a boy.

  In the last dream before the fever broke, I was crouching in front of the fire, feeding wood into its maw and watching my father talk to the young priest with drunken, melancholy dignity. I was fingering an old piece of candle and wondering how a voodoo doll could be made, and whether that sort of magic would kill the beast that has shifted from my grandfather on his death to my father. My mother stirs a pot, her hair falling to curtain her battered face.

  When I can rise again, the bed is crumpled and evil smelling as the lair of a wild animal. I make myself a cup of tea using a new teabag. I can barely hold the cup. I decide to have it black because there is no milk until tomorrow. It is not really tea, of course.

  I cross to the window and look out eagerly. The boy is there and I am pleased becaus
e I feared I had imagined him, or worse. I feared the beast had sought him out, despite its weakness. He has his back to me and he is looking up. I cannot tell which apartment holds him so rigidly attentive but I guess that he has learned somehow of that old murder and, boylike, ponders it.

  The young woman comes out and smiles at him easily. This tells me that they have met and spoken while I lay ill. I am disappointed to be denied the visual revelations of that meeting.

  She leans forward as he speaks, and I imagine his voice softly accented. She points away down the street and as he turns to look, I see the peach-suede curve of his cheek. Perhaps he has asked where she goes and she is making some vague reply.

  He says something else and points up, tilting his head expectantly at her. I sense that he has asked a question about the murder.

  It alarms her, for she steps back. She looks upstairs and shakes her head and says something. I have seen her glance up at the apartment above hers when she comes home at dusk. I had always supposed it was part of a general nervousness of men, given her lone state. But she might have got the murder story confused and think the man up there is the murderer of babies and wives. He was a suspect for a time and he has never been the same since that night. He murdered truth rather than name the beast he saw. It occurs to me he might even fear the beast will come for him eventually.

  The boy is watching the young woman. He is drinking in her fear, absorbing it. What is the pale stone of her fear doing to that clear mind? I wonder, as she hurries away.