Green Monkey Dreams (6 page)

Belatedly, Anna realised she had not found anything to eat. She hammered a long time before the woman responded.

The cellar bar slid open with a wooden rasping sound, and she waited a moment before descending the metal steps. As usual, the woman had retreated into the darkest corner of the cellar in case it was not Anna who knocked.

‘Food?' the woman asked in a guttural half-grunt.

Anna shook her head and tilted her face so the light showed her lips. ‘I'll find some. Tomorrow. I saw that boy again.'

‘Carnie,' the woman snarled, coming slightly forward.

‘No. I spoke to him . . .' Anna began, then lifted her fingers to make the finger-talk. She told the woman about the boy and the picture in her mind of bringing the boy to live with them, of talking in low voices and hunting together. He was small and skinny but she would teach him the way of killing silently to protect himself. And maybe they would try to find a way out of the city.

‘Carnie,' the woman repeated.

Anna opened her mouth, but before she could utter a word she heard the sound of a footfall, and whirled to see a bare foot touch the first step.

The woman made a long keening sound that made Anna's hair stand on end, and time seemed to slow as the boy jumped into the cellar. In the grey light falling from above he seemed bigger, his face an inhuman plane of angles and hollows.

The girl heard a distinct clicking sound that told her the woman had her terrible gun-weapon. She waited for the sneezing cough that meant it had spat out death at the boy.

The boy's head tilted and then was still as he spotted the woman in the shadows. His lips moved.

The woman stepped hesitantly into the light, her bone-white face strangely still. She lifted one hand and the fingers flicked out a question.

Anna pressed her fingers into the woman's palm. ‘He says, “Are you Mother?”'

Though her legs were numb the woman did not move for fear of waking the children whose heads lay in her lap.

The girl had often slept that way when she had first come to the cellar, but in recent times she had seemed to withdraw into herself.

No, the woman thought with wry honesty. She drew away because I pushed her away.

She shook her head, wondering that her mind was so clear.

Very gently, she laid her hand on the girl's head, and spoke the name of her dead daughter. The one who wore her name now was tough and violent, yet still a child for all that.

She looked at the boy and shook her head. He looked about eight or nine, but he might be older. He was nothing but skin and bone and that made it hard to tell.

The woman remembered her own childhood, long before the red dust came, in the lost world of yesterday. She had been frightened to sleep with the wardrobe door open for fear of what might come out of that dark space. Queer that she could recall so easily the terror of lying rigid on her back, waiting for morning to come and drive away the night terrors. She stroked the boy's matted hair and wondered that he slept so trustingly. His trust made a calmness in her, so that the long terrible years since the dust came seemed like shadow years.

It occurred to her that she had made the cellar into a kind of wardrobe all these dark years of hiding – both a place of refuge and of writhing terror.

I climbed into the wardrobe with my nightmares, she thought.

The cellar door was unbarred and moonlight shone obliquely through the opening. The air was cold on her arms where the blanket had slid from her shoulders, but still she did not move.

She looked at the boy again. He had spoken of Gordy. How queer that their paths had knitted together again. She had thought him eaten, but he must have escaped at the same time she did, and found the boy as she had found her cellar and the girl.

Her fingers closed around the boy's wrist easily. He must have been little more than a baby when his mother hid him in the wardrobe.

He called himself Roach and she had almost laughed aloud at that, knowing who had given the name. Trust his ironic sense of humour. Roach. Survivor.

She breathed in deeply, swallowing great mouthfuls of the clean cold air.

‘I am Mother,' she whispered to the night. ‘Tomorrow we will go to the Country.'

T
HE
B
EAST

A
s he emerges from the black taxi with its tinted windows and sleek carcass, I can see at once that he is one of those grave, serious children whom one would not notice in a crowd. He stands quietly waiting as if he has done it often, clad in spotless black shorts and a jacket that has obviously been tailored for him. These are clothes of a politician's son or some high official, perhaps a black
marketeer's boy. boy.

Centuries ago in another land, I wore similar garments to be confirmed. I cannot imagine why a boy dressed in such clothing has come here. This is an Industrial Zone, to begin with, not Residential, though there is little enough industry going on in it. The rows of factories are silent, inhabited by the mysterious, rusting machinery of another age, cogs still joined intimately in some unknowable rite from the Dark Age of Technology. Some furtive use of machinery still takes place in corners of these enormous places, but for the most part they are poor chop houses with almost everything being done by hand.

Glancing into them at night when they brought me home after my last Renewal, I caught sight of the fitful orange glow of forge fires being stoked in the cavernous darkness, and the gleam of a sweaty muscled arm. I felt I was looking into the Age of Stone said by many to be the first age of humankind.

It is not all factories, of course. Here and there are vacant lots studded with the inimical glint of dusty broken glass. Once this was prime land but no one builds factories any more so land has no value. In fact, no one builds anything any more because there is no need. There are far more dwellings than people to fill them, and even the wealthiest live like those crabs that once existed, scuttling from shell to shell.

It is almost funny now to think how people feared that the Renewal Vaccine would end up destroying the earth by overpopulation. Instead, people just stopped having children almost overnight. There was no need for them to inherit or provide a dynastic immortality when you could just stay around yourself. Then, instead of everyone choosing to go on and on forever as experts predicted, they still died at pretty much the same rate after a hiatus of a century or so. During that time the population growth was virtually at a standstill, but various wars and pogroms killed off thousands either immediately with bombs and bullets and poisonous gases, or eventually because of the destruction of food supplies and the onset of disease.

A lot more died when they stopped taking the Renewal Vaccine. People could go on and on, but what would be the point with the world the way it was? Better to see if there was any afterlife after all.

Of course, just because it is zoned Industrial does not mean people did not live here. Nor were they poor scrabbling workers. There were a few streets with grand houses on the edge of this sector. You can see the places where trees grew in their yards and even – the extravagance of it – in the streets as well, to shade and perfume the paths perhaps. These dwellings would have been inhabited by the factory bosses who ruled the world for a time. The trees have long been lopped down and even their stumps have been hacked from the ground by the Anti-Green lobby which was established after the dismantling of any industry deemed to harm the environment. When the Rainbow Ban was announced, people wept for joy in the streets in just the same way as they had once wept when the wall keeping the old Germany in two halves came down. It was a great moment. It was a Happily Ever After. But nobody ever
wonders what happens After That.

No one thought about all the people who lost their jobs, because the poor have always been powerless. They didn't reckon on the fact that for people with no life tomorrow was irrelevant; they need not trouble themselves about the consequences of their fury. The first great uprising was of the poor and nobody guessed how many of them there were until they rose in a great crashing churning tidal wave.

I remember the feeling of power that surged through me like molten gold as I marched with the rest, holes in my boots and my lice-ridden clothes in tatters. The sun shone that day because I felt we were doing something. A girl with red hair kissed me with a mouth that tasted of honey. Back then, in the beginning, I was capable of all kinds of love. I could be surprised and shocked.

The grand old houses used by the factory bosses in their days of glory were destroyed by the Anti-Greens because of their gardens and the trees, of all things. Or they might have been razed during one of the uprisings of the poor. Sometimes it's hard to remember who killed what and why. Or perhaps the police troops burned them under the command of the Elite who resented the union power of the labour bosses. Or maybe they were destroyed in the Neighbourhood Wars that followed the breakdown of countries and other such territorial boundaries. All of this happened before anarchy settled the world comfortably into a sort of general apathetic peace, so it could be left to meander to its demise.

There is no way of knowing what happened except by personal remembering since the scribes mark time no more. Most historians were killed in the Riots against Elitist Intellectuals half a century ago. Myself, I think of that as being the end of my world, and the Neanderthals now toiling away at their rough forges are the inheritors of the future. Time is circling back, devouring its own tail. Soon we will be slime and dust and then a whimper.

Of course things still exist. We humans are good at blindness. How else could we have failed to know the beast in our midst, except by wilfully not seeing it? There are schools run by the few Intellectuals who escaped the Riots, and who are trying to preserve and collect the lost knowledge of all the ages. And there are the New Intellectuals who teach whatever crystal and ley-line gibberish occurs to them, and who dream of the new world which they will ruin as fast as the old. There are the barter markets where you can exchange anything with the help of the Facilitators. There are men who call themselves Politicians who rule districts with brute squads, and blackmarketeers who sell their services and mercenary squads for hire to any Politician wanting to move in on another, or to Facilitators needing to deal with reluctant suppliers. There is even the odd car that escaped the Carbon Monoxide Ban that was set in force once the connection between automobile gases and mentally defective children was finally published.

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.