Read Online Green Monkey Dreams by Isobelle Carmody - Free Book Online

that one would come who would name the beast in me. I felt if someone saw him in me, then I could fight him, and drive him from me and the world.
    But no one saw.
    The second-storey flat has been empty for a long time because of the murder. The aide told me there was blood from one end of the apartment to the other, and that the wallpaper was soaked in it. The murderer had chased the woman from room to room. There were handmarks all over the place. The blood had been cleaned away but that kind of thing makes it virtually impossible to rent a place. Of course the agents tried to hide the history under a coat of paint, but the old violence had left indelible prints in the air that could not be painted over. To begin with, the To Let sign was changed regularly to stop prospective tenants realising the apartment had lain fallow for so long, and asking why. Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies – that is the way of salesmen and agents and men , my granny told me.
    Watching the boy and his mother mount the steps to enter the building opposite, I imagine them stopping to examine the foyer with its mouldy red carpet winding up half-rotted stairs. Then they turn into the ex-factory-worker’s room. Perhaps they find a few grease-stained rags and some empty State Beer cans. Maybe even a letter or two chewed to lace by rat embroiderers. Any minute the mother will hurry the boy out to the waiting taxi with disgusted grimaces. There has been a mistake , she will say.
    But they do not come out and after a moment, the taxi glides away. The removal van arrives. Men bring furniture in. They are sullen and careless. They do not understand why anyone would bother bringing furniture here. They heave and grunt as they unload the van, and then they rest before shifting everything inside. The furniture is finely made and expensive. From the crude identity tattoos, I see the removalists were once police troopers. They shake their heads as if they recognise the incongruity of this pair coming here. At one point, the mother appears to be having an argument with the van driver. I imagine him trying to tell her she should go somewhere else. This is no place for the child or you. This is a bad area.
    Where is there a place for us that is not bad? she must respond, if she would speak the truth. She points insistently to the apartment, and the rest of the furniture is brought in.
    After a week, the newcomers have settled into a routine which suits me very well. If the day is fine, the boy is let outside late in the morning. He plays there quietly on the step until his mother whisks him inside when the factory sirens announce the disgorgement of their staff. The mother never leaves the house except to go to the barter market. On those occasions, she locks the boy inside.
    The beast cannot help but stir at the thought of him in there alone.
    I let the sickness come into me for a while then to weaken the beast, for even now it is capable of striking out. How long I am ill, I cannot tell, except that when I return to my senses, there are several pails of milk gone rancid on the step. The landlord bangs on the door and asks am I alive and do I need an ambulance. He is annoyed because he thinks I should get Renewed or go to one of the Gentle Death vans and get my dying over and done with. I am well , I croak, but that is a lie. I am better but I toss in my bed, longing for release. Tenacious, I drift in and out of memories of the old green country. The boy gazes at me from the eye of a fox I once exchanged stares with, when I was a boy.
    In the last dream before the fever broke, I was crouching in front of the fire, feeding wood into its maw and watching my father talk to the young priest with drunken, melancholy dignity. I was fingering an old piece of candle and wondering how a voodoo doll could be made, and whether that sort of magic would kill the beast that has shifted from my grandfather on his death to my father. My mother stirs a pot,