Green Monkey Dreams (14 page)

He shifted the board to make the gap wider and propped his knee against it.

Paul was the second eldest. Luke with his flat expressionless face and eyes like Morlock holes was the eldest, and after Paul came Lily and Bo. The father had left years before. Fathers were a touchy subject in our house, but my mother once said Frank Gedding had done the right thing.

It was Lily who attracted me most. She looked like something out of
The Great Gatsby.
Dreamy green eyes, pale wavy blonde hair and a soft husky voice. I wanted to be friends with her the first time I saw her, but I didn't know how. I was too shy and dull to get anyone's attention, and Lily walked around listening to music no one else could hear. All the Geddings wore op-shop clothes. Not just the odd overcoat or jumper, but everything. Socks, pilled jumpers, old-fashioned skirts, maybe even underpants. But Lily still managed to look beautiful in them, like a princess in rags. That was how I thought of her too. A princess held captive by a witch mother. Only instead of just one captive, this witch had four.

‘She's mad, you know. It's in our blood,' Paul said suddenly, as if he had read my mind.

We met often after that. Sometimes I had been locked out, but more often him. And sometimes we went there because we wanted to. The Doghouse, he called it, and I adopted the name. We talked and laughed and were silent in the Doghouse, but if I saw him at school or in the street, he would ignore me, or even walk the other way.

‘Why don't you talk to me at school?' I asked once. ‘Because it might be catching,' he said.

I stared at him, wondering if that was the why of the Geddings. Maybe they had some terrible disease.

Paul started to laugh at the look on my face. ‘I mean people might think you're like me. Us. The Geddings.'

‘It wouldn't matter.'

He shook his head.

At Christmas I gave him a present. He blushed.

‘I haven't got one for you.'

‘Open it,' I said, excited.

He turned the carefully wrapped and ribboned parcel round in his big fingers as if it were a kind of animal that might bite. ‘The present is inside,' I said pointedly.

He laughed shamefacedly and plucked at the string.

‘Give us it here,' I said, and ripped the paper and ribbon off.

It was a lighter. I had bought it from a shop selling estate jewellery for the family of someone who had died. It had meant skimping on everyone else. I sent my father a card. He wouldn't care about not getting socks. He probably had a whole drawer of socks and ties and handkerchiefs still in their Christmas wrapping.

Paul held up the lighter with a kind of astonished wonder. ‘Gold.'

I never dared ask him openly about anything, but I heard a lot of it anyway. Paul was a storyteller. He made up stories to tell me. Some were gruesome mysteries in which dozens of people were violently murdered, and others were funny gentle stories about make-believe creatures. Some of the real stories came through in both. Maybe a person can't stop the real things leaking in. There were often witches in his stories.

When Lily's head was shaved, he told me a story of an invincible magician whose power source was his long hair. One day a witch, wanting the power, shaved his head, leaving him helpless, an easy target for the robbers who killed him. And I wondered if there had been some power in Lily that her mother had wanted to possess.

Later Paul told me his mother had chopped off a bit of Lily's ear, in her rage to get all the hair. ‘There were buckets of blood,' he said.

One time, not long before the end, I heard him calling while I was hanging out the washing. His voice sounded strange and croaky.

‘Are you sick?' I asked over the fence.

He shook his head and put his hands around his throat as if he meant to strangle himself. ‘My mother,' he said in a whispery voice.

He told me she had tried to hang him, pulling his jumper down to show the raw ribbed ring around his neck. She had made the noose from an extension cord, and tried to hang him from a hook on the back of the bathroom door. The nails had given way.

‘But she wouldn't really,' I said. ‘She was trying to scare you.'

Paul stared at me and I thought of a story my father had once told about a man who had taken his children into a dark wood where a cannibal witch had waited in a gingerbread house to eat them.

‘What will you do?' I asked.

He shrugged wearily. ‘She'll forget by tonight. It doesn't matter anyway.' He pointed to a spider web we had watched evolve over the last weeks in the gap between the boards. A strange spider had bumbled accidentally into the web, and was waving its other legs frantically. I reached a finger forward to free it, but Paul caught my wrist.

‘You can't interfere with nature,' he said fiercely. The spider which owned the web raced forward and began to saw off one of the waving legs. Revolted, I stared back. ‘That's probably one of the old babies from the last lot. They have hundreds, you know,' Paul added coldly.

A few days later I found him shaking the board, wrecking the web. The fat spider was frantically eating the pouch full of its eggs.

‘See,' Paul said. ‘It's not women and children first. It's
survival of the fittest. All that building and planning and one day God makes an earthquake and it's all gone.
I suppose that spider thinks I'm God.'

The Geddings were Catholics. Paul said Catholics drank blood and ate flesh as part of the appeasing of their violent God. I thought that maybe Paul's God was
mad too.

I had never been to church except to be baptised. My mother was an atheist. I didn't know what I was yet. Sometimes I walked past the Catholic church and wondered if the police knew the place was run by cannibals.

The last time was like the first time. I was sitting on my own in the shed making a monumental wax paw. When
I looked up, his green eyes were in the crack.

‘Hi,' I said, preoccupied. It took me a minute to realise
he hadn't answered. I looked up. ‘What's the matter?'

‘I have to go,' he told me in a low voice. ‘If I don't, maybe I'll end up mad too. Maybe I'm already mad.' He was
shaking from head to toe.

‘What is it?' I asked. I reached my human hand through
the gap and touched his arm.

It was like touching a live wire. A current ran shockingly between us, as if some energy in him was being earthed into me. He looked up with a strange expression of recognition in his eyes. My hands itched but I only understood later that another skin was waiting to be shed, that I was growing. That was how I saw growing, a process that happened in short violent bursts triggered by some catalyst.

He used my hand to pull me to the gap and leaned through it. I knew he was going to kiss me and my whole body felt light. I felt sick too, like the first time I had ridden a two wheeler, or the first time I had told a lie and been believed.

His lips were softer than I had imagined, brushing mine lightly as if he was testing the temperature, as if he thought my lips might burn him. Then he kissed me hard and it was nothing like the passionate movie-star kisses I had practised on my pillow. It was wetter, clumsier and more slippery than I had imagined. My heart juddered wildly in my chest. I could see that the wax claw had begun to crack and crumble away. There was a rushing noise in my ears like the sound made by the miniature ocean inside a seashell.

The fingers of my other hand were curled against his chest. His heart was pounding too.

He let go of me suddenly and shook his head. ‘I have to go,' he said, as if I had argued against it.

‘I hate her,' I said, and burst into tears. The tears leaking out of my eyes had tasted as warm and salty as blood. Dimly it occurred to me that tears were a kind of bleeding.

‘You don't understand,' he said with finality. ‘It's not just her.'

I was filled with anger that he could become so suddenly adult and lofty.

He relented and told me a story. ‘When she was young, there was a princess and she married the handsome prince. She thought it would be all happily ever after. Everyone told princesses that was how it was. But she found out it was all a lie. There was only getting old and dying and having babies who would get old and die without ever knowing what it was all for. So she became a witch. The questions made her a witch.'

He was right. I didn't understand and I stared at him dumbly, seeing that he could love her in spite of everything.

‘Will you ever come back?' I asked, trying not to cry again.

He only reached through the gap to squeeze my hand. A few days later my mother told me Bo had been killed. He had fallen under a train, almost dragging his mother with him. It had happened the same day Paul left.

Paul had told me Bo often stood on the edge of the platform as if daring the train to sweep him under. I had even seen him once, teetering on the brink with his wild hurt grin making the other commuters nervous.

And so he had fallen, or jumped, or been pushed.

Last night Gram died, finally losing her tenacious hold on life. My mother had fallen asleep in the chair beside the bed, her mouth open slightly, snoring. I felt a rush of love for her sprawled so weary and sad.

I looked up and found Gram watching me. ‘I'm dying,' she said softly, suddenly normal after days of raving. ‘Nothing stops it coming. I wouldn't mind if I could have known why.'

‘Why?' I echoed.

‘What it was all for. The pain, the loving and losing. Living,' she said. Then she smiled, a sad, oddly beautiful smile.

Not long after, she died, life going out of her with a curious little regretful sigh.

Her words made me think of what Paul had said, about madness coming because there were no answers. I felt a sudden coldness, knowing the seeds of madness were in me too: the hunger for answers.

I thought of Paul, and finally understood what he had tried to tell me: that it was me as much as his mother that made him run away. He had recognised the potential for transformation in me, the witch vying with the princess. He did not understand that there were other choices, that I was evolving into something quite different with my third eye; something harder and colder than princesses, something braver than witches.

‘Paul?' his mother echoed, sitting upright on the porch sofa. ‘Paul?'

I had often wondered what became of him. Had he been too much of a Gedding to escape? Had he found his own platform to jump from? Or had he found a place to belong where witches and princesses would not torment and tear at him?

My skin itched suddenly, as if another was waiting to be sloughed away. I closed my eyes and let the third eye open, and understood that I would never know, and was content with not knowing.

I looked down at his mother, the witch queen. She was staring at me hungrily, questioning.

I turned and walked back to the bus stop.

S
EEK
N
O
M
ORE

‘T
here he is!'

Noah bolted, cutting between two stone angels and grazing his knee. He dropped into a crouch, heart thundering. If he could get away from Buddha and his gang, he might just get back in time. There would be hell to pay if anyone discovered he had gone out today of all days.

Looking down at the fine black dirt, he was glad he had worn dark clothes, although Mrs Belfrey always tried to discourage him from wearing black. ‘It makes you look anaemic, dear.'

He knew the darkness accentuated his pale skin and bone-white hair. Buddha and his bully boys had nick
named him Spook because he was so pale. Noah told Mrs Belfrey dark colours hid the dirt but that wasn't the real reason he liked black; it wasn't the
main
reason.

The man in the dream was the main reason. He had white hair like Noah's, but it was long and flowing around his shoulders like a lion's mane. Pale skin too, but where Noah's eyes were grey, the dream man's were silver. He wore black, but he didn't look anaemic. He looked shining and somehow magical. Noah wore dark clothes because he wanted to look like the man who appeared in his dream the same night Buddha first beat him up.

He and another boy chased Noah from the bus stop, cornering him not far from Glastenbury.

‘Look at 'im. He's got no blood,' said the other boy. Tall and bony, he had prodded Noah hard in the chest as he spoke.

‘He's got blood all right,' big Buddha sneered, out of breath and red in the face from the chase. Then he'd punched Noah in the nose. The pain had been awful and Noah thought he must die from something that could cause so much hurt.

He grinned, thinking of the fuss Mrs Belfrey had made over the blood. The smile faded when he remembered how he'd been forced to retell his story in Mrs Bourquin's office. He had not expected the policeman to go straight after Buddha, turning a lone beating into a vendetta. Neither the orphanage people nor the police seemed to remember Noah had to keep on going to school with Buddha. It never occurred to them that Buddha might want revenge.