Green Monkey Dreams (5 page)

For a while the boy made the marks that told his name everywhere they went in their twilight excursions. Then Gordy told him the Carnies might notice the markings and wonder who made them. It seemed the Carnies might know the secret language too.

‘Who knows how much they might remember?' Gordy had mused.

The boy did not believe the dirty wild Carnies were capable of such knowledge, but he kept his doubts inside his mouth and did not let the words show his thoughts.

Before Gordy came, the boy had been alone. For as far back as he could remember, he had hidden from the Carnies. There had been more of them once, but he supposed they just kept eating one another and so there were fewer and fewer.

Each night he hid in the wardrobe in his high scraper room, and when the sun disappeared he would hunt scritchins until the moon came.

The night Gordy came, he had heard the Carnies' hunting calls from the street below, and noises that told him someone had entered his scraper.

He heard the sounds of footsteps and his sweat was cold as he imagined the Carnies grinning their horrible mad grins as they squatted, waiting in a circle.

Stiff with terror, he had lain unmoving in the wardrobe for long hours. He had peed himself, and he bit his tongue rather than cry out when the cramps twisted his muscles. In the end, he came out because he was exhausted with the dreadful waiting and imagining. Better to be eaten.

But when he came out, there was only Gordy asleep across the doorway. While the boy was trying to make up his mind what to do, Gordy had opened his eyes and spoken.

Roach recognised the word ‘eat' and thought Gordy was announcing his intention.

‘You might as well eat me and get it over with,' he had said. Roach remembered those words and now he understood what they meant.

Somehow they had sorted it out. Roach could hardly recall how, though he remembered vividly the terror of the hiding and the waiting.

Gordy had escaped from a Carnie camp and his eyes had been filled with hurting as he told his story. The Carnies had hunted him, but he had given them the slip, and ended up in Roach's wardrobe room.

‘Makes you wonder, doesn't it?' Gordy had said.

Once they understood each other, Gordy had wanted to know everything Roach could remember until his head hurt with all the thinking and remembering.

‘Why do you hide in the wardrobe?' Gordy asked.

His questions were like picking a scab you thought was healed. Sometimes there was more there than you thought, and it hurt. Sometimes he would remember a new thing.

One night Roach dreamed of a woman. Not a Carnie woman with breasts that sagged like old waterbags and filthy matted hair, but a woman whose hands were as smooth and warm as the insides of his legs. He dreamed she was much bigger than he, and had pressed her lips on his mouth and face and put him into the wardrobe. ‘Be very quiet, my sweet,' she had whispered. ‘When I come back we'll go to the country where we'll be safe.'

The next morning he had told the words of the dream to Gordy. ‘It might have happened that way,' Gordy decided. ‘It might be that this woman was your mother. Maybe she was one of them who didn't give in to the dust so quick. Maybe she tried to lead the Carnies away from you.'

‘She'll come back for me,' Roach announced.

‘Maybe,' Gordy responded.

Roach could tell from the way Gordy's eyes slid away that he did not believe the Mother would return, but he had not seen the look in the dream-woman's eyes as she made her whispered promise. Roach had been unable to find the words to show the look to Gordy, but he knew the woman called Mother would come back and take him to Country where there would be no Carnies or crumbling scrapers, and where there might be other roaches who had resisted the madness of the red dust.

After Gordy was taken, Roach discovered loneliness was a thing that ate into your belly like hunger, and which no food would ease. He began to long for the time when the Mother would return. He dreamed of Country, and it became a fantastical place where green grass covered the ground like in the park where the Carnie gangs fought their battles.

Gordy had explained the Carnies belonged to gangs. They hunted one another and the few mad loners for food, and also fought wars which were bloody savage gang battles where the losers were thrown shrieking into the cooking-fires as part of the victory feast. He said the wars were part of an older madness.

Roach had dreadful silent nightmares for a long time over what he saw in the park the day Gordy had taken him there. And he never forgot Gordy's warning.

‘Be careful. Never let the Carnies see you or guess you exist, or they will hunt you until they find you. And they will eat you.'

Gordy had tried to convince him to sleep outside the wardrobe, but Roach had refused. In the end this saved him, for the Carnies came one night while they slept.

‘Stay! Stay!' Gordy had screamed, and the Carnies had laughed, thinking he pleaded to be left. But trembling in the wardrobe dark, Roach had understood that last desperate message.

Days passed before hunger drove him from the fetid urine reek of the closet, his mind filled with pictures of the man he had seen thrown screaming onto the fire in the park. Only this time, the man had Gordy's face.

He had never seen Gordy again.

Not long after, the mother dream began to recur.

Sometimes the dreams turned into nightmares at the last minute when the Mother smiled, revealing sharpened Carnie teeth. Roach began to think of going out to look for the Mother-woman, or for Country. But he did not know where to begin.

And then he remembered a thing Gordy had told him about books. ‘You can find the answers to any question in books, if you know how to read. Some books can even teach you that.'

And so he had begun the search for the book that would give him the magic knowledge of the black markings. The wardrobe room was filled with books which were yet to reveal their secrets.

He had asked Gordy once to scratch the ‘Mother' word, and he especially kept books where he could find that marking. Each night he dreamed of the Mother, and each night it seemed to him she was more real, and closer, and that she would come very soon to bring him to Country.

Perhaps this book was the one. His heart juddered in his chest as he heard a faint sound behind him.

‘Be careful . . .' His mouth shaped the Gordy warning.

Anna stared down from her vantage point at the lone boy crouched over the ruins of a fallen building.

She guessed it was the skyscraper she had heard fall in the night, and her stomach rumbled at the thought that the boy had found food packets. She was bone-weary of the bitter taste of cockroaches and wondered what kept her from leaving the woman and the dead city. In her heart she believed there was no end to the city, but sometimes she dreamed of a place where there were endless trees and great expanses of grass, and even a great pool of water called Sea. Sometimes she thought of searching for the dream place.

It was cold outside the cellar.

The woman called this cold Wintertime. The boy below was clad in ragged shorts and did not seem to notice the chill in the air. She had seen him before since she had begun to roam more widely in search of food packets.

She had told the woman about him, but the woman said he was a Carnie or some sort of trap to catch them.

‘You want them to come here and eat me,' she had accused.

Anna had not answered, but she did not think the boy was a Carnie. For one thing, he was too skinny. The Carnies were well-fleshed, though she sometimes wondered what they would do when they ran out of people to eat. The boy was even thinner than she was. The sun showed the knobs along his spine where the scant flesh stretched tight. And he was always on his own. The Carnies travelled in packs.

But most of all, Anna knew he was no Carnie because of the silence. That was one thing about the Carnies – they were always gibbering and screaming at one another. You could hear them long before they appeared. They were stupid and loud and clumsy.

She could see the boy was straining to reach into a crevice and again the thought of food stirred in her.

The woman hated being alone and had not wanted her to come out. She was deaf – easy game for the Carnies. If Anna had not stumbled onto the cellar where the woman hid, she would probably be dead. Even though there were fewer Carnies than there used to be, the woman would not leave the cellar, and each time Anna went to search for food, the woman seemed more reluctant to open the bars to let her back in.

The woman had not always been so. In the beginning she had taught Anna a way of making words with her fingers, and they had spoken for many hours in the darkness of the cellar.

But now the woman lamented her own survival endlessly, talking of the past with longing and despair until Anna was tempted to hit her on the head with a brick. What was the sense in talking about ‘before'? Now was now, and that was all there was to it.

Anna checked the knife in her holster. She had killed three Carnies with that knife and two with the one before. She always hid the bodies and left them for the cockroaches to finish off, though she doubted the Carnies even noticed the disappearance of their companions.

Hiding the bodies, she had sometimes wondered if it would be such a terrible thing to eat manflesh. Before she had found the woman and the cellar, she had begun seriously to consider it. The only thing that stopped her was a fear that the madness in the Carnie flesh would somehow get into her.

The woman had been captured by the Carnies and had managed to escape, but her daughter and man had been eaten, so Anna had never brought up the idea of eating manflesh. The woman's daughter had been called Anna and this was the name the woman called her, pressing wet lips on her face.

Anna rubbed her cheek unconsciously at the memory. Somehow the name had stuck though she could not see the use of names with only the two of them left in the world.

‘And we won't be here much longer if I don't find some food,' Anna murmured to herself. Food had been difficult until the woman had told her which packets were all right. She was grateful for that knowledge. But now the packets were getting scarce. There were always plenty of cockroaches, but you got sick if they were all you ate.

If only the woman would agree to come out of the cellar, they might find a better place. For the hundredth time, Anna wondered why she did not leave. Twice the woman had almost got them killed blasting away at shadows with her gun-weapon.

Absently, Anna ate two dried cockroaches and let her hand rest on the ridged hilt of her knife. She decided to go down, telling herself food
was
worth the risk. She could kill the boy and take the food packets if she had to.

She moved through the disintegrating building to street level, relieved and disdainful to find the boy had not moved. How stupid to sit out in the open like that for so long! Surveying the street with narrowed eyes, Anna left the shelter of the building and felt the sun on her bare head like a warning finger.

She resisted the temptation to look behind her. There was a kind of madness in too much looking behind.

She was little more than three steps from the boy when he swung round without warning. The shock in his eyes told her he had not heard her. She saw that the thing he had in his hands was not a packet of food, but a book.

The immediate fright faded from the boy's narrow face, and Anna saw that he read in her the same qualities that distinguished him from the Carnies. Close up she could see he was not as young as she had thought.

‘Are you going to kill me?' he asked, his voice unexpectedly deep and rusty, as if it were not often used. That voice told her he was a loner. That was how her voice had sounded once.

She was startled to realise her knife had leapt into her hand. She let the point drop but did not put it away. ‘Why do you gather books?' she asked, her own voice pitched low.

‘You're not a Carnie,' the boy said.

‘I'm called Anna,' she said, deciding there might be some point in having a name after all.

‘Where do you come from? Do you come from Country?' His eyes were fever-bright, though he did not have the hectic red cheeks that went with that sickness. Anna noticed the way his ribs defined themselves through his skin and the bones of his knee joints stuck out. When she did not answer, he began to sidle away.

Anna felt baffled. ‘Why do you collect books?' she demanded.

The boy flinched at her tone and his eyes scanned the street around them, reminding her of the risk they took standing in the open. He carried nothing to defend himself. She wondered how he had survived even this long.

‘I know where there are lots of books, if you want me to show you,' she said, sensing the boy would run any second without some bait to keep him. She could not say why she wanted to bind him to her. Perhaps it was that he was another survivor – who knew what that might mean. And it was true that she knew of a building where a giant room was filled with books.

‘Books?' His voice was intense. ‘Show me,' he whispered.

Anna looked around and shook her head firmly. ‘I will come back another day and show you. It's going to rain.'

The boy stepped closer to her. ‘Take me to the books.'

Anna lifted her knife warningly. ‘No. I told you I'll come back.'

The boy seemed not to hear her, and the sky was heavy with rain clouds. Any minute it would pour. Anna backed away. ‘You'd better get in before the Carnies come.'

This seemed to penetrate the boy's trance and he looked around him convulsively. Anna took this moment of inattention to slip into a doorway and disappear.

She made her way straight back to the cellar, knowing the woman would not let her in if it began to rain. She could not distinguish between the rain vibration and the vibration Anna made hammering on the cellar door.

Picking her way over the partly crumbled building that rose above the cellar, Anna passed the lettering which told the building's name: IBRARY. Entering the section of the building which was still intact, Anna gagged slightly at the rotting musty smell of the shelves filled with books. Once, she had hidden between the shelves because the woman had locked her out when the Carnies came hunting. The smell of the books made her feel sick and she wondered again why the boy collected them.