Green Monkey Dreams (13 page)

Matthew saw himself being gathered up and there was a sweetness in that, but there was also something frightening. But maybe that was what belonging meant?

‘I guess you better come with me to Monk's this arvo,' Dave said, his eyes crinkling.

There it was at last. Matthew had not known until that second how desperately he wanted to belong somewhere. Yet he hesitated. Deep down he had always known that Dave and Dave's way must mean a submersion of him. He had said nothing to Dave then, but the offer was there and it would not come again. Somehow he knew that too. And when they passed Sophie in the street. later that day on the way to Monk's, it was as if fate had presented him with its betrayal. A feeling of dismay came over him. Dave hated wogs and for the first time Matthew saw that Sophie was a wog.

He looked out at the sea. The paper run waited. He recalled how she had stepped back and the acceptance in her eyes: the smile fading and eyes flickering to Dave. Dave. In Dave's world there would be no place for dreaming and for watching ships come and go. Perhaps there had never been a choice, not really. He had been part of it all for too long. The voices were in his head forever. I'm not strong enough to fight the world for a dream, he thought. That's worse than any dragon.

His bike waited. He felt as though the last ship had gone. The bay was empty. But suddenly two seagulls flew overhead, their wings like big dark claws against the yellow sky. He watched until they had disappeared out to sea.

T
HE
W
ITCH
S
EED

R
iding back to the old neighbourhood felt like I had come a lot further than a few suburbs, maybe back in time. I found myself thinking of his mother, the witch
queen, wondering if she would tell me where he was.

The familiar streets were oddly quiet around me. It struck me that neighbourhoods grew up too. Kids get older and leave home, parents just get old. No more kids yelling in the street on week
ends, no more dogs barking, no more street games of cricket or water fights, and even the telephone box on the corner hasn't been vandalised.

No one knows I've come. It would be no good telling my mother. I tried to tell her once about the next-door neighbours, when I read in the paper Lily had died. She got that vacant look on her face and lit a cigarette in her quick fussy way, as if the cigarette was the only thing that made talking to me bearable. ‘What can you do?' she asked. So I dropped it.

Our old house looked smaller.

Next door was the same brooding mansion with its frowning eaves and sullen drooping willows, still infested with her poisonous magic.

I was startled to see her sitting on the mouldy sofa on the porch, baggy old skin sucking at her big white teeth. All the better to eat you with, her eyes seemed to say: goblin dark and glistening as if they had been dipped in olive oil.

She watched me come up the overgrown walk with the suspicious malevolent look old people get after a while, as if they're looking through you, to make sure death isn't lurking behind your eyes.

The Eskimos had a better way of it, sending their old people out onto an icefloe to die quick and clean. Better than leaving them to go mad waiting for it, like my old gram.

On the way, I had seen a woman rummaging in the rubbish bin.

As I came level, she whipped her head up and stared at me, clutching an old tea cosy to her scrawny chicken's neck. ‘Did you see my baby?' she asked.

I didn't turn around. I mean, she might once have found a baby in a rubbish bin, abandoned. Or put her own illegitimate baby there. I'd read of that kind of thing happening. A woman doesn't want her baby, so she puts it in the bin. the bin.

Some kids would be better off dying in a rubbish bin.

‘What is it? What do you want?' Mrs Gedding asked in a scratchy, frightened voice. I could tell she didn't know who I was. was.

‘I'm looking for Paul,' I said.

I think I have been looking for Paul for years, because the questions that fill me began with him. Underneath everyday things, I kept thinking about him and the others: Lily and poor Bo and Luke. Sometimes I wished I could get them out of my head, stop myself coming back and turning it all around, trying to understand. It's like I'm stuck in a groove, hearing the same line over and over. That's partly
why I decided to come back.

My mother hated the old neighbourhood, blamed my father for our having to live there. She felt we didn't belong and tried to barricade us in with threats when she went off to work at night. She used to tell Bubba and me to stay inside or the welfare would get us. For years I thought the welfare was some sort of monster. Then later, when I was too old for monsters, I thought the welfare was a domestic spying service. I thought there was a whole government department devoted to watching our house, making sure we didn't go into the street at night. Kids believe anything.

I spend a lot of time trying to understand the why of things. My mother says I was born asking why and drove everyone crazy demanding reasons. Sometimes I had to
be slapped to make me shut up.

That must have been why I started keeping things inside, turning thoughts around like a Rubik's cube, looking for clues. People are always comparing me to Bubba, wondering why I am so dull.

It was Bubba who told me my eyes were too close together. He said you were supposed to be able to fit an imaginary eye between your two eyes, like a cyclops. More than enough space for a third eye meant you were stupid, too little meant you were secretive.

I am secretive. I like knowing things no one else knows.

After he told me that, I used to imagine I did have a third eye that saw things ordinary eyes couldn't see. It would only work when the two normal eyes were closed. I spent most of my time looking through the secret third eye with its distorted truths.

My mother said I get the secretive aspects of my nature from Gram, whom I used to hate and often think of murdering. I hated my mother a little too, for her weakness in taking the old dragon in.

‘She's old and she's my mother,' my own mother said defensively, as if I ought to take a lesson from that.

Gram was crazy. Sometimes she refused to eat because she was certain my mother was trying to poison her. And my mother would look hurt and try to cover it with smiling. I hated her for wasting the time, for wanting love from Gram instead of from me.

‘Alex will be back to get me soon,' Gram would whisper, mistaking me for an ally. My Human Studies teacher told me it's called a Persecution Complex, and lots of old people get it. But I had never seen a mad man like that. Mad men murder and shoot guns and kill themselves or go to gaol. It seemed to me women suffer a different kind of madness. Something darker and more cruel. And being afraid is part of it.

Gram was always thinking people were watching her, shop girls, the milkman, bus drivers. Even if the phone rang or someone knocked at the door, she would get that hunted look in her eyes.

But maddest of all was his mother. Sitting on the porch, she was worse than Gram making my mother beg for love like a dog, worse than my mother for taking Gram in. But now she looks scared too.

And what makes them afraid? I used to think it was death. At the end of all the mad fears was the biggest fear of all. Gram keeping watch for the poisoner of poached eggs, the icefloe messengers, watching for death in all its guises. I reckon you ought to be glad to go when you're that old and ugly. What's the point of living when you can't do anything but be scared? And yet how they cling to life, sticking their cracked fu manchu nails into the crevices, hanging in there.

Mum used to go out to her meetings, Bubba disappeared with his pizza-faced mates, and I stayed home with Gram and her Persecution Complex. I was home on my own with her the night I first talked to him.

She yelled out, and I pretended not to hear, humming to myself, getting revenge for my mother. I waited just long enough for her to yell again, then I came in mid-bellow, and she huffed impotently, glaring at me.

‘Mother, I'm sure she doesn't dawdle deliberately. You're being silly. You know what she's like – in a dream half the time,' my mother would say the next day when Gram reported me.

That night I had drawn the curtain, wading through the soupy yellow air in a room where the windows were always closed. She told me to pull the blind as well so no one could see in. Her teeth grinned wolfishly at me from a glass beside the bed. Flapping her lips together, she watched to make sure I closed it completely, shutting out the peeping toms and rapists and axe murderers panting to look in her bedroom.

I was about to leave when she started on my mother, started raving about how wonderful Alex was, and how he'd come for her soon, take her away.

Sometimes you can take it and sometimes you can't.

I turned around and told her the facts: that dear Alex, her only begotten son, couldn't stand her, had gone to the other side of the world to get away from her. ‘No one wanted you. My mother took you because there was no one else. Like a stray cat you find on the doorstep.' Then I closed the door on her white face.

I was shaking and I couldn't bear to be in the house with her. I went out to the woodshed, hoping she would have a fit and die while I was out of earshot. I had sat there so often, waiting to be let inside after fights with my mother, that I started to feel a sense of belonging. I had a store of candles, and I used to sit for hours, dripping hot wax onto my hand until I could no longer feel the slight burns, and the hand became a lumpy lurid paw in the flamelight.

My anger would ebb slowly, as the layers of wax built up, and finally I would sigh, looking at my leper claw with tired satisfaction. That night I lit the candle and started to drip away without thinking.

The shed was backed up to the fence and the Geddings' shed on the other side was a mirror image of ours. The fence formed the back wall of both sheds, and was a rickety barrier with feeble nails holding brittle grey boards together. Neither family could afford a new fence so it lived propped up on both sides by dozens of extra bits of wood. Clinging by its fingernails.

I was staring at the wax claw critically, trying to decide where to put the next drop, when I heard a scratching noise from the other side of the fence. I froze, imagining rats. Suddenly one of the fence boards rattled and slid aside. A green eye looked through the crack.

It looked at me, then it looked at the wax claw. I looked down, feeling embarrassed and weird, even though the eye had to belong to a Gedding.

If he had laughed or sneered, that would have finished the thing. Strange how so much can hang on one tiny action, or reaction. He looked up from the hand to my face. ‘Got a scratch?'

I blinked, not understanding.

The green eye frowned half-impatiently. ‘Match?'

Wordless, I held the candle out. The board jerked again then slid further aside revealing a mouth, a nose and another eye. A dirty, bony hand put a cigarette between the lips and I held the flame to the tip. He puffed deeply with his eyes closed, then looked back at the claw. ‘Does it burn?'

‘A bit,' I said. I let the little reservoir of wax that had built up fall onto a gap.

There was quietness for a minute, then he held the cigarette out. ‘Smoke?'

I set the candle down and he passed the cigarette carefully through the gap. It was awkward smoking with the wrong hand. The cigarette was moist against my lips and I shivered and pressed my knees together, thinking of it being between his lips.

I drew in a mouthful of smoke very carefully, then eased it down my throat so I wouldn't cough. It tasted like I had licked out an ashtray.
Cancer
, my mind thought in a dazzling little flare of fright.

I exhaled then, and was mortified to see nothing come out. I knew the smoke had gone in, so where was it now? Coating my lungs with its cancerous poisons? I swallowed, at the same time thinking it probably looked like I had faked a drawback. Humiliated, I passed the cigarette back.

‘It's a bad habit,' he said kindly.

I shrugged. ‘I always think of cancer and it makes me nervous.'

‘I'm not afraid of dying,' he said. ‘It's living that's hard.' He looked at me abruptly. ‘Are you locked out?'

I shook my head. ‘You?'

He gave me a hard suspicious look, then he sighed and smiled. ‘I guess you can hear if I can.' There was a silence, then he said, ‘Your mother sounds pretty fussy. I hear her yelling at you to clean up all the time. Even on Saturdays.'

I nodded. ‘She's mad on cleaning and I mean mad. It's all she cares about. It's a sickness.' I looked at him. He was staring at the tip of his cigarette. ‘I hear you sometimes. I hear your mother—' I began, then stopped because there was no way to say the rest. To say I heard her holding their heads down the toilet as a punishment, flushing them, heard the choking and begging, heard the screaming and swearing, heard her say she would kill them, chop them into bits, burn them; didn't say:
I hear the witch.