Green Monkey Dreams by Isobelle Carmody Page 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 fascinating 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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€¢ • •
    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.
    â€¢ • •
    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.’

C ORFU
    H e 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