Green Monkey Dreams by Isobelle Carmody

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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜I’m not,’ I said. ‘Mum’ll kill us.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜No!’ I gasped, delighted.
    â€˜It could be a swag of money,’ Evan said seductively. ‘She could be a robber queen.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜I can’t see anything,’ I whispered, disappointed. ‘She’s left the light off.’
    â€˜Hang on. Let’s have a look.’ Evan swung past me onto the next windowsill, agile as a monkey. He glanced in and froze.
    â€˜Not that one,’ I hissed irritably.
    But he waved a