Cornered, you would always sacrifice someone else if it would save you. There were no heroes in the Monster Game. Heroes got eaten.
‘Evan’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.
‘You know it’s only me,’ she would say.
‘But you might turn into something else. A real monster,’ Annabel told her.
‘Or 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.
As a family we were believers. Not just in God, but in fairies and magic, vampires, werewolves and the power of the full moon. When times became harder and boarders often ran out without paying their arrears, when the house grew cold and our stomachs were empty, it was Poppy who would make us forget with her games and her stories.
‘I am a storyteller and I have magical powers,’ she once announced, just as she might announce she was a monster or a leper. And we would believe her for she did have power. Stories gushed out of her and we all wallowed in them.
Truth was never a constant for Poppy. It was a thing that was to be transformed by her storytelling into something wondrous and larger than life. She would recount an adventure and the wilder it got, the more believable she made it. She was the kind of person who could make you believe in anything.
The real-life dramas occurring all around us – the evictions, the breadline queues, the sackings and the suicides – were irrelevant to the world Poppy wove around us. She used the real world but whatever her words touched, altered. Even my father, who died too soon and too quickly, became another of her malleable characters, so that in the end you forgot what he was really like and remembered only Poppy’s creation.
Thus did she subtly change our history.
‘What did Our Father do?’ Gertie would ask. She remembered him least.
And it was always Our Father. Not dad or da. Our Father who art in heaven. Hallowed be thy name.
I have only a single true memory of my father. He was taking me somewhere on a bus. He pointed to a round tower in the field next to the cemetery where he was later buried, and told me that this was where they buried a giant. Rigor mortis had set in before the giant’s body had been laid out, leaving one arm stuck out in front of him. Rather than dig a much deeper hole to incorporate the extended arm, it was decided to bury the body and then to entomb the arm in a tower of grey cement.
Whenever I pass that cemetery, I think not of my father, but of that dead giant’s final rebellion against the rigid conformity of death. ‘Long live the giant,’ I whisper to myself.
In later years, I have seen little of my family. Things were never the same after Poppy left us. I don’t sleep as soundly as I used to. I am an insomniac now, a legacy contracted, no doubt, from the toilet seat.
‘Don’t sit on the toilet seat,’ my mother’s ghost warns.
When Poppy was a girl before the truces of womanhood, she and my mother fought endlessly. Terrible screaming arguments when words flew through the air like knives, wounding anyone who got in the way. These arguments sent my mother white, but I think Poppy relished the drama of them. She had an unfailing sense for atmosphere. Her life was a canvas of purple passions, chaos and colour threaded with dark skeins of fear and pain, and not the sad, pathetic scramble I have found my own life to be.
Maybe it was the essential innocence in Poppy that gave her words magic. She was undefiled by reality. It did not bind or restrain her. Only her audience mattered and she had a gift for knowing them.
‘Children are not subtle creatures,’ I once heard her say. ‘They are like new rocks, all jag-edged and half-formed. Time alone renders them smooth and lets you see the grain beneath the surface.’
‘Stories for children,’ Poppy said, ‘must be as rough and ready as their audience.’
Poppy was the best part of those years in which people starved and wept and despaired. With her we inhabited a fantasy world where anything could happen. Nothing in the real world could touch us. As kids, we had few friends because it was difficult for anyone else to enter the complex imaginary world she built about us. And in adapting, we were alienated from those about us.
We all adored her, even Dave, though her favourite was clumsy, sweet-faced Tommy. I felt I bored her, but with Poppy that was no distinction. She was easily bored. She was an impatient dreamer, rarely finishing anything and never meeting anyone who measured up to the beings that peopled her imagination.
Poppy did not get along well with adults, though they were often attracted to her. Once in a shop she ate a five pound note rather than pay a price she found exorbitant for a pie. She said that gesture had been maliciously misunderstood by the newspapers who reported her as hysterically unbalanced. She claimed that ours was not a good world for gestures.
Mrs Barstow crept into the house not long after that, clutching an oddly shaped parcel.
Dave and Ben were in the kitchen playing cards as they did day after day. At the beginning of the Depression they had queued up for jobs, confident in their youth and their strength, but that had worn off. Evan and I were in the hallway when Mrs Barstow came in. Evan was tormenting Gertie by pretending to torture a toy cat someone had made for her from a moth-eaten fur tippet.
‘Come on, Nicky,’ he said, pointing up the stairs when she had disappeared into her room. ‘Let’s climb up the pear tree and see what she’s got.’
‘I’m not,’ I said. ‘Mum’ll kill us.’
‘She won’t find out, stupid,’ Evan said contemptuously. ‘How can you stand not knowing what she has. It could be the head of a body.’
‘No!’ I gasped, delighted.
‘It could be a swag of money,’ Evan said seductively. ‘She could be a robber queen.’
‘The tree won’t hold us,’ I said weakly.
Evan grinned. ‘Sure it will. I’ve been up thousands of times.’
Naturally, he made me go up first.
I inched along the knobbled arthritic branches, with twigs and grey-green leaves sticking vindictively into my bare legs. Reaching the branch nearest the sewing-room window, I climbed onto the sill.
‘I can’t see anything,’ I whispered, disappointed. ‘She’s left the light off.’
‘Hang on. Let’s have a look.’ Evan swung past me onto the next windowsill, agile as a monkey. He glanced in and froze.
‘Not that one,’ I hissed irritably.
But he waved a hand frantically without taking his eyes from the window. I crawled across and looked in too.
At first I could see nothing, then the slow shadows took shape in the dim orange glow of the firelight. At once, I knew whose room we were spying on. No one but Mr Bracegirdle could afford coal.
There were two naked bodies on the bed. I knew what they were about. I leaned closer, my breath frosting the glass. There was something fascinati
ng about the play of light on the pale flesh, the twined legs and sliding fingers. It looked to me as if the larger body was trying to absorb the one beneath it.
‘Jeez,’ Evan breathed. ‘Jezus.’
I was shocked, but relished my mother’s reaction when we told her old Bracegirdle had a woman in his room. That would be the end of him. I gloated at the downfall of the Meat Man.
‘Mum’ll have a breakdown,’ Evan whispered. ‘Poppy and the Meat Man. Jeez.’
And he went on talking, but I could hear nothing. The room behind the glass seemed red now, a window straight into hell, for even as he spoke the woman on the bed had turned her face to the window . . .
I can’t remember exactly what happened next. Poppy saw us, I think, peering in at her. She screamed and Evan fell off the sill in fright, breaking his arm in two places. I sat on the windowsill like a frozen gargoyle until Dave came and dragged me down by the scruff of the neck calling me a dirty little spy.
Poppy disappeared that night and Mr Bracegirdle left the next morning.
I saw Poppy only once after that. She came back to collect her things. I was sitting on the step with a stray cat in my lap. She did not look at me as she came up the steps and inside I heard the sound of an argument as she and my mother screamed at each other.
When she came back out, Poppy stopped beside me. After a long time I looked up at her. Her face was thin and twisted with bitterness.
‘Don’t be so bloody pious, Nicky. Who do you think has been feeding you? Who paid for your schoolbooks?’
When I said nothing, she shrugged and walked away, carrying her little suitcase. The back of her skirt was grubby. It was not a thing I would normally have noticed.
• • •
For Poppy there were two worlds. Survival was important in the real world, but reality must not intrude on the other dream world of her imaginings. The dream world made the real world bearable. I had been more important to Poppy than I realised in keeping the two worlds apart. I had been a clean mirror for her to look into. I had seen Poppy the way she was in the other world: the world of her dreams and stories.
When I looked through Mr Bracegirdle’s window, I smashed that mirror into a million cutting pieces.
A long time ago, Dave the opportunist told me that life was a game. ‘You learn the rules,’ he said. ‘Then you twist them to suit yourself.’
I think life is more like the Monster Game. You chase life, confident you’re in control, that you’re the monster. But you can’t help looking behind just in case some other monster is sneaking up.
And maybe one day everyone turns around and the real monster is there, and you know his name when you look into his face, because he’s you.
When I looked in that window, I destroyed the old Poppy who had built a fragile wall between the sordid business of surviving in the real world, and her world of make-believe.
But I did worse than that, I made Poppy look at the monster.
• • •
I wish I could apologise to her. I would say: ‘Long live the giant who protects us from the monsters of reality, who keeps our dreams safe.’
CORFU
He had taken his bike then, and ridden for a long time, away from the housing commission area with its countless futile lives that hemmed him in. He rode up the highway and into town, passing its scaffolded dead centre which was destined to become the new Market Square and rise like Phoenix from the ashes. They had been at it again so he had slipped out. Escaped. There were times when he felt the fighting and screaming was all there was, and even when he was alone the voices went on saying the same old things inside his head: her martyred voice and Dave’s low snarl.
Matthew backpedalled to slow up, and looked down the main street into the early morning. The sun had yet to rise but on days like this there were no splendid dawns, just a grey luminescence that got steadily brighter. The scaffolding of the complex looked like steel bones. Hard to believe there had once been streets in there and sidewalks and shops and parking meters. Now it was one dark building and even the tough kids avoided it and the temptation of vandalising it. That would come later, maybe. Matthew wondered what it was all for. The old streets had been all right. It was still the same old town, still a drab place where nobody important ever came or visited. A backwater.
He let the bike pick up speed again and a sweeper truck swished around the corner and gurgled off in the opposite direction. The street lights blinked off suddenly, like magic. Sometimes he and Sophie had pretended they were the only people left in the whole world. That was what the streets felt like now.
He came at last to the sea with a feeling of relief. The quiet rush of the waves and the faint whistling sound the wind made in the swings rose up to meet him. He coasted the bike to a stop and let the stillness come into him. There was a cleanliness to the world at that hour: a cold promise to the coming day. The sea was like liquid shadow and produced an oddly fetching gurgle as it moved along the edge of the cement car park bordering the water. He chained his bike and walked further along where the cement gave way to a brief, grey stretch of sand.
Mostly he left early for the paper run, letting his mother believe it took longer than it did so he could have some freedom. Then Mr Murphy had made him head runner so he had afternoon runs when one of the other paper boys was sick. That meant he could get down to the sea some afternoons. The time he chose to come depended on his mood. Today was a morning mood because he felt the need to be alone and think.
At dusk the bay was a different place. There were people around and the city noise drowned out the waves. But at least the dusk stopped you seeing right across the stretch of water to where the industries belched out their filtered smog. And unless it rained and the fish took refuge in the deeps from the pounding on the surface, the old men would be there in the fading light, dressed in their shabby shapeless jumpers and baggy trousers, fishing off the end of the pier. At first he had shared the pier grudgingly with them, and mentally found himself echoing Dave’s notion that all wogs should ‘Go Home’. But he came to accept their presence, their queer-sounding English. And one day one of the men had spoken to him.
‘Eh, boy! What you coming here every day only to stare? You no want to fish!’
It was the fattest of the group who spoke, a man with bright eyes and nut-coloured skin. He had introduced himself as Tony.
‘I like watching the boats,’ Matthew had told them, looking out at the horizon to where he had seen a hundred rust-blooded hulks drift across.
‘Maybe you want to be a sailor then,’ Tony asked on another occasion.
‘No. I just want to travel. You know. See the world. I want to go somewhere where things are different.’
‘Everywhere things are the same.’ Tony smiled.
Matthew shrugged.
‘You will have to grow up an’ get rich then. Better if you be a sailor an’ see the world.’
‘Here is good,’ said another of the men.
‘I’m going to find my father,’ Matthew said quietly.
‘Where is he?’ Tony started.
Matthew pretended not to hear and the silence grew. The old men were no fools. They understood.
‘Well,’ Tony said brightly. ‘Well, I think he must be in Corfu for that is the best place in all the world. All sailors know the most beautiful place in the world. The sun never stops shining in the day and the water is warm like bathing water. Ahhh . . .’
A dark, rat-faced man snorted.
‘What, Peter?’ Tony demanded.
‘An’ the women,’ he gasped, imitating Tony. The men laughed.
‘Women are only a memory for him,’ said another fisherman. ‘Corfu is past.’
‘Corfu does not go away,’ said Tony. ‘It is still baking in the sun.’
‘All things change.’ Peter smiled, and toasted Tony from a small bottle of brandy. ‘Corfu is many miles away,’ he said. ‘Very far. Too far for fat old men. But not for a boy.’
Those men
laughed a lot. More than people Matthew knew. They talked endlessly of Greece: their youth, villages, friends and relatives dead and alive and far away. Their lives were part of hundreds of other lives. Matthew felt his own existence to be curiously barren by comparison. He had no friends and only one aunt whom he had never seen, living in Sydney. Apart from Dave and his mother there was only a faint memory of a grandmother and no memory at all of his father. Even while Matthew dreamed of freedom and independence he was drawn to the Greek men and their well-peopled memories.
Then he met Sophie. It had rained all day. He had known the men would not be there, but he went anyway to visit their ghosts. He was halfway down the pier before he realised there was someone at the other end. He hesitated, but went on. When he reached the end he saw the lone person was a girl. At first he thought she had not noticed his approach. Her thick brows were nearly joined in a ferocious frown. What was she thinking? She looked up and there was no point pretending he hadn’t been staring. She was quite plain with dark, frizzy hair.
‘I know you,’ she said simply, and without waiting for an answer, looked back out to where the factory haze was suffused with fading gold. ‘I’ve seen you before. With the men. You know what they call you?’ She flicked him a casual glance to see if he wanted to know. ‘They call you the stowaway. They say you want to go away.’
She looked away again and Matthew followed her gaze. A bluster of wind brought the sea smell to him sharply fresh and strangely mingled with the smell of soap and oranges. He imagined Corfu must smell like that.
‘I’m Sophie,’ she said. ‘Why do you want to stow away?’
‘I want to get away from here.’
‘What about your family?’
‘You mean my brother and mother. I want to get away from them most of all.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘And your father?’
‘I don’t even know what he looks like. There’s a photo but . . .’ He shrugged.
Green Monkey Dreams Page 8
