Green Monkey Dreams (10 page)
âWhy not?' Kora asked, but she was looking at Sim.
He took a deep breath, sucking in the salty smell of the dreams crashing against the land, growing more blue by the moment, shimmering with sequins of light; he sucked them into his thrilling soul.
âO why not indeed?' he whispered.
âSometimes it seemed the giant's hand must be
shaped into a plea for mercy . . .'
W
ell then, the Monster Game.
This would be a good name for childhood, but the Monster Game I'm talking about is not childhood
itself, though it began there for me.
Children's lives are mostly monstrous games in which they strive to understand the forces that regulate their existence. Some never do learn that there are no rules, no regulations and no rhymes large enough and complex enough to give living any real purpose.
Childhood was no place to be in the Depression. I can't remember the first time I heard that word. Maybe it created itself. The hunger and the poverty seemed to come from nowhere too, like a mushroom born out of nothing on a green lawn. And once born, it went on forever. The only thing about it that affected me directly was the hunger. There never seemed to be enough to eat. Always bread and dripping to fill up on.
Dripping then wasn't the same as it is today.
There was nothing unique or poetic about my hunger. Almost everyone was skinny in the Depression. Except Mr Bracegirdle.
But I don't want to think about him. Not yet, anyway.
I remember little of all the people who traipsed and dragged their feet through our lives and our living room during those years. Everything runs together â hazy, ill-connected incidents and scraggy bits of this and that.
I remember my mother feeding the boarders.
We had been comfortable before the Depression. My mother had come from a good family who owned their own home. My father had not been of her class, but he had offered prospects. How we fell into trouble and debt, I don't know. Maybe it was all part of living through that time. People lost fortunes overnight, prosperous businesses faded into shuttered obscurity with no one knowing why. There was simply no money and no work. My father dying of something to do with his lungs might have been part of it. There was less and less money after that. Then one evening, my mother announced that we would take in guests. Her lips trembled when she said these words, and she held her head very high.
Poppy was ashen but the rest of us goggled, wondering what sort of guests could produce such a reaction in her. Only in time did we come to realise that by guests, my mother meant paying boarders. But she never spoke of them as such. âOur guests,' she always called them, uttering this euphemism to the last.
I was moved in with Annabel and Poppy.
âYou can't put him in with the other boys. They'll bully him,' my mother explained.
She was attractive, of course; delicately built with soft skin and none of Poppy's boldness. But she had a stubborn streak and a fierce desire to redeem herself from marrying my father, from being poor, from having so many children. She had a determination not to sink into the mire beneath these disadvantages, and that meant keeping clean.
She was the cleanest woman I've ever known. She didn't even smell of sweat.
I remember she used to say to us: âNo one will say my house is dirty because I've got so many children.' She would examine every face anxiously for condemnation. She feared people would brand her ill-bred or slovenly for having so many kids and scrub, scrub, scrub all through the years, all the while sighing as though God and the whole world had made her get down on her hands and knees and rubadubdub.
Why she had so many kids when she seemed perpetually embarrassed by her fecundity, I do not understand. Yet she loved us. I think we were a compensation of some sort, a protection from whatever monsters menace grown-ups.
I was never close to her. Sons are supposed, I know, to
have this bond with their mothers. Ben and Tommy certainly did, and even Dave in his devil-may-care way. The girls were devoted to her too, except Poppy who was
too wild to be devoted to anyone.
When I was young, I loved her in the same quiet, desperate way I have always loved. The dramatics in my family were doled out liberally to Dave and Poppy, and even
in some measure to Annabel and Gertie. But not to me.
Maybe because of being the youngest, I was a sort of afterthought in most people's minds. I suffered from a crippling shyness â as if I was forever coming into a room filled with disapproving strangers. I must have seemed a pathetic creature beside the others.
The guests came and went.
They could eat, for a small consideration, the meals my mother made for the family. Depending on how many took advantage of this offer, we kids either ate with them in splendid elegance at my mother's precious cedar table, or in the kitchen. On the whole we preferred the kitchen because it was cosier and you could eat with your fingers and clean up the boarders' plates on the rare occasion any
scraps were left.
Of the parade of smiling or scowling guests that passed through our doors in those years, I remember only two clearly.
Mrs Barstow had flaming red hair, blue eyes and faintly greenish skin. She may have been a martian. Certainly she was not quite human. She rented our smallest room, a tiny annexe that had once been a sewing room. Unlike many of the others, she paid her rent promptly and in advance. Yet like some slinking criminal mastermind, she would creep into the house, leaping comically into the air if anyone spoke to her.
We discovered that she would come home early sometimes and sit for hours in our old cubby before coming inside at her usual time.
âMrs Barstow's in the cubby again,' Evan would whisper.
Evan and I were thrown together by virtue of our ages, but we were wary siblings for the most part, conscious of our essential differences. Evan spent hours up the peppercorn tree in the front yard on hot days and you never knew what he'd have up there with him, whether he'd let you come up or bombard you with cow dung.
Once he had a bottle of cooking sherry he had pinched from the kitchen, another time it was a dirty book he had got from one of the boarders' rooms.
Another time it was an insect farm.
He had seen an advertisement in the back of an American comic and had decided to start his own business marketing ant farms. He thought it was just a matter of domesticating the ants. When I climbed up, he had advanced from the ploughshare to the sword and was staging battles between various insects. The tiny creatures were proving uncooperative, preferring to examine the gauze lid for an escape route to being gladiators.
They would only fight, Evan explained, if he shook the bottle, and that was what he did. He waited for them to scale the edges, then just as they reached the gauze he would shake and the ant or spider would fall back. Infuriated, it would become aggressive and attack anything that moved.
Evan said he was priming his fighters for battle, but I think he liked the futility of their minuscule struggle for freedom against his omniscient and malicious power.
It is no surprise to me that now he is a prosecuting barrister, presiding coldly over this or that life, goading people to give away more than they mean to.
Perhaps the reason why Mrs Barstow so fascinated Evan lay in his own essential oddness. Evan wanted to know what she did in the cubby house. He wanted us to spy on her and find out. I was too scared. Evan would not go alone and I refused to go at all.
Nevertheless, the cubby was a magical place because of the mystery surrounding it. Maybe Mrs Barstow put the magic in there with the drips of candlewax and cigarette butts. No one ever discovered what she did. She probably just smoked and thought her weird thoughts, but it seemed to us she was a witch who cast spells there and did unspeakable things to frogs.
My mother told us to mind our business. She didn't care what the boarders did as long as they did it quietly and brought no one up to their rooms. For the most part, she preferred to behave as if they did not exist.
So why did she choose Mr Bracegirdle as her special pet?
Not for his appearance, surely. He was a plump, untidy little man with hair that was too long and lank, and soft grapelike eyes. His mouth, sandwiched between a narrow moustache and a bulbous chin, was red and small like the mouth of a cat, and curiously feminine.
Within hours of paying in advance for the largest room in the house, he had a workman change the lock on the door, as though we were a lot of thieves. The first night he came he shouted at Gertie for playing too loudly, and he called my mother âmy good woman', which ought to have put anyone off.
I think it was his plumpness that caught her, for in those lean days it suggested plenty. He must have understood this for he wore his fat with the same pride as he wore a gold fob watch with the chain strung ostentatiously across his middle. Why this should make him an object of admiration in my mother's eyes when all around us people were starving, I don't know.
Mr Bracegirdle nurtured and took advantage of my mother's softness over him. He would discuss politics with her in a pompous voice and defer to her opinion as she doled out a second helping to him. He lent her books in foreign languages which she could not read, and exchanged sly and pointed looks with her over the dining table. He fluttered his eyelashes at her until my mother was beside herself.
When he reproved Poppy for going without stockings in the house, my mother sighed and shook her head. Poppy loathed him and would mimic the waddling movement of his fat behind. She dubbed him the Meat Man, and the nickname stuck, though we only used it behind his back.
We started playing the Monster Game before Mr Bracegirdle came and after my father died. It started as a hide and chase game, but Poppy, who could not let anything go without embellishment, thought it would be far more thrilling not just to be hunted in the dark, but to be hunted by a monster.
âLet's play the Monster Game,' Evan would say, and when she was in a good mood Poppy would grin a crooked grin with her crooked mouth and nod. Then everyone, even Dave, would hide in the darkened two-storey house. After a minute and a warning, Poppy the monster would come after us.
We would hear her clearly from our hiding places, growling and slavering, horrifically realistic. Almost suffocated with terror and excitement, I would lie still in the wardrobe or behind a curtain, listening to her coming closer.
Sometimes she would artistically drag one foot and breathe raggedly. I always felt a bit sorry for that monster, who seemed to be on his last legs. Sometimes there was a drooling maniac who would cackle and make quick, sudden dashes. I didn't like that one, but the scariest creature in Poppy's repertoire was the breather.
That monster would move stealthily, stalking its prey in utter silence. You would not hear it until suddenly, heart-stoppingly close, there would be heavy, hungry breathing. You never knew if it was just someone looking for a better hiding place, or the monster. If you made the mistake of calling out softly, a savage howl of laughter would slice the silence and you knew you were doomed.
Those monsters were remarkably clumsy when it came to catching their victims though. Years later, it occurs to me that they were a special breed of monster: a hybrid that lived on fear rather than flesh. There is a lot of that sort in the real world.
Cornered, you would always sacrifice someone else if it would save you. There were no heroes in the Monster Game. Heroes got eaten.
âEvan's under the bed!' Annabel would shout when she heard the monster approach her own hiding place.
Then we were all on the run, rampaging up and down the stairs, Poppy lumbering after us, and it was chasey, locked doors, giggles and thumping hearts. And when we were tired, or more to the point when Poppy was tired, we would go to the kitchen, thirsty, hot and overexcited, to dissect the game and laugh at near-fatal accidents.
Like the time Tommy climbed the tree to escape the monster and was left behind when the rest of us fled into the house. Poppy knew somebody was still hidden, and she growled experimentally. Tommy was so frightened at hearing the monster below that he forgot to hold on and plummeted to the ground screeching and crashing through the lower branches.
Oh boy. Those were the best times. Days of milk and honey.
Poppy asked us once why we got so scared.
âYou know it's only me,' she would say.
âBut you might turn into something else. A real monster,' Annabel told her.
âOr a murderer might get in and kill you and then come after us and we wouldn't know,' said Gertie, wild-eyed.
Those were reasons to run, but maybe the real reason the game had such power was because Poppy believed. Not that she would undergo a monstrous metamorphosis, but that she would bring some nightmarish thing to life with the potency of her imagining. She once told me that when everyone else was running from Poppy the Monster, she would run even faster so that she would not be left alone.