Green Monkey Dreams (8 page)

I cross to the window and look out eagerly. The boy is there and I am pleased because 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.

The boy gazes after her for a time, then turns his eyes fleetingly to my window.

For a while, like an Indian summer, I am well in the midst of my dying. I come to the window each morning and the boy is there clutching a bit of protein toast, or drawing in the dust. Sometimes he reads. That tells me he is educated. I wonder what he is reading as a breeze riffles the pages.
Occasionally he looks up at my window.

He knows I am here. Often, he looks up at the apartments where the man upstairs lives. His attention seems divided between his upstairs neighbour and me. Two people he has never seen. Once the man in the room above him bumped the old blind as we watched from our two vantage points, that boy and I. Or perhaps it was only a breeze. The boy nodded to himself.
What does he see?

A picture comes into my mind of the boy and his mother listening to the man upstairs shambling back and forwards through the yellow murk, stopping occasionally to scratch at the floor. A despair fills me at the thought of them fearing the man and fearing the beast. All this fear creates a stink that will rouse the beast and draw it to them.

That night I crossed myself, then gave the warding-off sign which my granny had taught me. A gypsy showed her. The priest had told me God could help drive off the beast if it ever came to me, but I felt my granny was a more serious contender. I wish now she had told me more about how to deal with the beast. But all she did was warn me that I
could not run from what ailed me, or the world.

‘It's all linked, lad. You are the world and it is you. You can't flee from one bit of the world by going to another. You can't run away from your mouth or your feet.'

I had laughed and kissed her and swung her round till she squealed and whacked me across the ear. The red-haired girl laughed.

‘Ow!' I laughed too. ‘What makes you think I'm running away and not running to something?'

She had only smiled, showing blunt, naked gums. ‘You can't run from what you are.'

I had gone over the great seas, saved and worked and done a few shady things before I got a librarian's certificate. I thought I would educate myself the rest of the way. With the world in such a state, I wanted to get away from the beast on the rampage. I lost myself in books. I loved them, but in the end the oldest books began to smell to me like the cottage I was born in. The papers reeked of my mother's dank tears and my father's desperate rages; the words smelled of despair taken from the heart of trees of sorrow. I sensed the beast all about me as if he had come there and urinated over everything, marking his territory.

I smelled of the beast.

Only then did I understand what my granny had meant when she said I could not escape. She had not meant the beast would follow me, but that he was already everywhere. I had a wife and a child and friends when the beast slipped into me, and before he was done, I had lost them all. I did not care until he withdrew from me, leaving me limp and flaccid. Utterly spent.

For some days rain blurs the window like tears, and I do not bother to rise, knowing the boy will be kept in. But when the sun comes up again, I shuffle to the window and peer out in hope and dread. The boy is on the step, shining like a
star, and there is an ominous thudding at my temples.

The young woman comes creeping along the street now, and she is almost on top of the boy before she seems to see him. Maybe she is on drugs. The boy asks something and her lips move. Perhaps she is saying:
What are you doing out
so early?
or
Why do you shine?

She points to the apartment above hers.
That is where the beast lives
, she is saying.

I can almost hear her words.

That is where the slayer of children and babies dwells. That is the blackener of women's eyes, the lip-splitter and wielder of lit cigarette butts. That is the dealer in broken arms and jaws and necks. That is the king of the bullies and brutes. That is where the lover of pain and bullets hides.

The boy shakes his head, and he turns to face my window.

He points to me. His eyes are like searchlights, fearless and innocent.
There is the beast. Up there
, he says.
He is watching us now
.

I start back from his terrible brightness, shivering with terror and hope, for perhaps at the uttermost end of all things, there is hope. If one can come who will see the beast and name it, perhaps it may be defied and driven back.

T
HE
L
EMMING
F
ACTOR

T
he music trilled and fluted, at once wooing and commanding, imperious and intoxicating. The notes were faint, but Sim strained his ears to catch the edge of each one. The tune reminded him of the smell of hot buttercups, of greengrass and the milky mothersmell of his blinddays. It reminded him of the first time he had held his baby brother against his chest. It reminded him of
dusk when the light was so beautiful; it ached his throat.

He let the music possess him and fill him up with memories and dreams, because it stopped him thinking.

‘I am so tired,' Rill said softly.

Sim gave the youngling a startled look, for Rill might as well have stolen the words out of his own head. Neither Rill nor his older sisterblood noticed Sim watch
ing them.

‘I am tired, too, Rill,' Kora responded softly. ‘But we must keep going, for see how far behind we have fallen. What will happen if the song fades before we reach the end of the road?'

What indeed?
Sim thought, but he could not make himself believe it would come to that. It had been promised that the second piping would gather up those who had been left behind in the first great exodus.

To be slow was not to doubt the Piper. It was not lack of faith.

Of course, Sim had not always believed in the Piper, though it shamed him to admit it. There was no proof he existed. Nothing tangible. Just rambling memories and half stories, passed on through generations, of the first time the Piper had summoned their people to the road. Then, it was said, he had walked before them, tall in a coat of many colours, a long silver pipe held between his fingers and set to his lips. He had led them, piping all the while, working his ancient magic to bring together road and land and Great Blue above, so that they might cross to Evermore.

‘But how do we know it is true?' Sim had asked when he had grown old enough to understand the gaps in the old stories. ‘I mean, if all of our people went with the Piper to Evermore, why are some of us here still?'

Not all had gone, he had been told sadly. The sick and the halt and some mams fearing for their younglings had stopped their ears with wads of grass and stayed behind. Some had stayed out of doubt and others out of fear of discovering nothing, for it was said those who set their paws upon the road were bound to it forever. Without the Piper's magic to bring together earth and the Great Blue, the road ran on endlessly.

Someone else told him everyone had taken to the road when the Piper piped, for his music had been irresistible, not just a command but a wooing. But many had fallen by the way, for the road was a test – long and hard, requiring endurance and faith. No one had been allowed time to rest and there had been no water and very little food along the way. Some had given up and turned back. It was said by all that the magic required to bring the road to the Great Blue, so they could cross, drained the land and the Piper himself so that the road could only be held together for a certain time. Hence the fear of falling behind, that they would miss the way to Evermore and be bound to the road for eternity.

There was another story that said the earth was not bound to the Great Blue, but that the Piper had spun a bridge of sunlight and water between one and the other. The bridge had been all but transparent. When the moment came, some could not bring themselves to step onto it. Others missed out when they arrived too late, for the bridge lasted only as long as the last note held.

‘When you see the bridge of colour and light in the sky, it is the Piper's sign that he will return for those of us who failed the first time. It is his promise, written in the Great Blue.'

Sim had heard all the stories.

‘How do you know he will come again?' he had asked his mam before she died.

She had smiled a weary smile. ‘He left one behind – the Prophet – who travelled among the ones who had not gone and told us what the Piper had told him: that he would not ever come again, but that he would send his song to bring us to the place where the land will meet with the Great Blue. And a way will open to Evermore where there is no hunger or sickness or fear or pain, and where there will be a celebration to end all celebrations, as our people are reunited with the Ones Who Went Before.'

His mam had died that night, and he had wept and hoped she had found her way to Evermore, for he had then believed that death was the only real way to go beyond the Great Blue. He had believed that, right up to the moment the Song swelled into the air, filling his veins and his sinews with sweet fire.

That had been many days ago. Days beyond counting. Days and nights of running and stumbling and of the song woven into the air, calling and pulling at his soul. At all of their souls. Even poor Sorah with his crippled paw. And Kora whose face Sim's eyes had been resting on at that very moment, and who seemed to change before his eyes. The hard aggression and the ambition had dissolved into a kind of light that reminded him of the milky dusks where everything was uncertain and half-formed, fraught with possibilities.

Sim stole another look at her, knowing that whatever she said to comfort Rill, she was not tired. The pace was nothing to Kora the Bold, who could have been running alongside the other frontrunners. Would have been, except that her mam had died of the bloat only two days before the song swelled on the winds, summoning them all to the road. That had left Kora responsible for her four little brothers: Rill, Mif, Lekkie and silent, solemn little Floret, just out of his blinddays.

It was hard to know who to pity more – the mam for missing the pilgrimage to the Great Blue, or Kora, saddled with the younglings. She could have left them to fend for themselves. The old Kora would have. She was big and strong and athletic, and she had run further and faster than most. When the Piper called, it was clear to anyone with half a brain that she would be one of the first to reach the Great Blue – maybe even the Firstcomer, who it was said would sit at the right hand of the Piper at the celebration in Evermore.

Her decision to pace her brothers was received with incredulity, for it meant sacrificing her chance to be the first. A lot of the others thought Kora a fool, and had said so loudly, as if personally affronted by her decision. She might have made someone else stay back with her little brothers, they said. No one would have blamed her. After all, everyone was supposed to run their own race.

But Kora had run along with the little ones, chivvying them and encouraging them, falling further and further behind.

Sim wondered if she regretted her decision now.

It was different for him. Even if he had not been pacing Sorah, he would never have been near the front. In the ritual runs which he now understood were training for the greatest run of all, he had never managed to be anywhere near the front. His mind would begin to drift and before he knew it, he would be running with the stragglers. The elders called him a lazy dreamer who ought to have run harder.