Dreamside Page 12

  Ella had her suspicions about what was happening. She sensed that Brad Cousins was in some malevolent way responsible, though she was unable to guess why. And he wouldn't be drawn.

  "What happened between you two?" she asked for the fifth time. They sat in a pub with ultraviolet strip lighting and a jukebox belting out Motown classics. Brad offered a shrug.

  "Don't try to dismiss the question, Brad."

  "I'm not trying to dismiss the question, I am dismissing the question."

  "Something happened on dreamside that's made her cut herself off from us, and I know it's something you did."

  "How do you know that?"

  "Because you've the guts of a sewer rat."

  "Ease up Ella," said Lee, bringing in the beer. "Tell us what happened when you went to her room."

  "She was in there. I know it. She pretended she wasn't. I even shouted that I knew she was there, but she wouldn't open the door and she wouldn't speak to me." She jabbed a finger dangerously close to Brad's face. "He's responsible."

  "It's been nearly five weeks," said Lee.

  "You know what it's about, don't you Brad?"

  "Get off my back. Go and ask her for Christ's sake."

  "No, I'm asking you." Ella turned to Lee. "Honora won't speak to us, so we've only got this reptile to tell us."

  Brad suddenly slammed down his pint glass sending a tide of beer cascading across the table. Lee and Ella jumped back. "Why don't you get a muzzle on that rabid mouth of yours, jealous bitch." He stormed out of the bar, slamming a foot into the jukebox and bouncing the stylus into silence.

  "You asked for that," said Lee.

  Ella had actually paid three unanswered visits to Honora's room. Each time there had been a light on and a radio playing, but Honora had consistently refused to respond. They never saw her around the university campus and she didn't attend lectures.

  Visits to dreamside were never quite the same again. There was a marked down-turn in the excitement of just being there. The sense of expectation had died. Before, the place had always been seeded with the scent of honeysuckle. Now it was flat and perfumeless, and troubled by underlying anxieties more felt than understood. They never referred to this anxiety, and the more it went unspoken, the more it grew. Without saying anything, they found themselves resisting the powerful undertow that had been taking them unasked for so long. They were shocked at the effort required to stay away, but eventually their visits thinned out, then dried up completely.

  In waking time, things started to go badly for Ella and Lee too. Perhaps this deterioration in their relationship caused the dreamside sag. When it came down to it, the best part of their romance had been conducted on dreamside, and sometimes, now, they were at a loss with each other's ordinariness.

  One afternoon Lee looked at Ella, and where he had formerly seen an exotic priestess, there was now a girl with scuffed shoes and hastily applied lipstick.

  Ella woke up one morning, and where she had once lain with a young warrior bearing a flaming torch into the dark labyrinths of the psyche, she now found herself in bed alongside a boy with a fluffy beard, who hadn't much to say for himself.

  Problems were compounded when Brad "confessed" to Lee that he and Ella had, on occasion, successfully conducted their own dreamtime rendezvous. Lee was genuinely shocked. It had never occurred to him that other dreamtime activities might have been going on in his absence.

  "It's a lie," Ella protested, "and it's ridiculous."

  "Maybe that's what he meant when he called you jealous."

  "I don't believe I'm hearing this! You take in any lie that ape comes out with, and you don't believe a word I say! How can you do that to me?"

  Lee let the idea niggle him. Ella was livid. They argued, ridicu­lously and histrionically, but most of all badly. After that they didn't see each other for over a week.

  Lee made the first conciliatory move, driven by some news he had heard in the union bar.

  "She did what?" Ella went white.

  "She took a load of pills. They had to pump her stomach."

  "Oh God! Can we go and see her?"

  "Apparently she's already gone home."

  "What? Ireland home?"

  "Yes, Ireland home."

  "When did all this happen?"

  "Four or five days ago."

  "But what about her course? Her exams?" Lee only shrugged. "Why did I know that something like this was going to happen? We never paid enough attention to her. We were too wrapped up in ourselves."

  "Yes."

  Ella sat down and began to roll a cigarette. "Please stay with me tonight," she said, without looking up. "I get frightened at night and I'm having bad dreams."

  Lee nodded. "You know I want to stay with you."

  They made friends again, and made love again. The news about Honora made them vulnerable, and for a while they were gentle with each other.

  The day after Lee broke the news, Ella got Honora's home tele­phone number from the university registrar. Honora's father answered, asked who it was and went to fetch his daughter. He came back on the line to tell her that Honora wasn't well enough to come to the phone, but that she was much better and thank you for calling.

  Lee, on going to find out how much Brad knew, discovered that he had cleared out of his bed-sit without notice. It had been some time since he had turned in for a lecture, and none of his fellow medical students had seen him in weeks. Lee got Brad's landlady to unlock the door of his room. She stood over him, shaking her keys and listing complaints against student tenants while he inspected the abandoned room. There were a number of medical reference books and a shelf full of sci-fi paperbacks; a battered mono record player and a handful of scratched and sleeveless albums; an oil-fired roadwork lantern, a police bollard and the amber dome from a Belisha beacon, plus other trophies and street paraphernalia which for some reason he felt happy to keep in his room; and a few clothes, though all the decent stuff had gone along with his suitcase and bags. There was nothing there he wasn't better off without. Lee told the land­lady differently, but he knew for certain that Brad wouldn't be com­ing back.

  With two of them gone, it didn't come as a complete surprise to Lee, when, towards the end of the spring term, a pink handwritten envelope appeared in his room one morning. It had been shoved under the door sometime during the small hours:

  Dear Lee, I still love you but I've got to get my head straightened out. Remember that holiday we planned for the Greeks Islands, before every thing got heavy? That's where I'm going, I don't know for how long. Maybe I will come back after that and finish my degree, though it's pointless at the moment—/ haven't done a stroke of work since I met you and we got mixed up in the dreaming. I haven't got the guts to face you with this, which is why the letter. You're a good man and there will never be any forgetting the things we have done but I've got to get out of it. I'm crying while I'm writing this. I meant that about still loving you. Finish your studies, at least one of us should. Ella

  Though it was half-expected, Lee was devastated. The four of them had been isolated from the rest of the university, and now he was left completely alone. Honora had been carried out on a stretcher; Brad had bolted; and now Ella had run away to hide. It was exactly a year since he and Ella had come together. He knew he would never get over her.

  Like a good boy he stayed at the university and completed his studies. From the end of that term he lived like a monk, got his head down and caught up on a year's neglected reading. He worked hard and was awarded a respectable but undistinguished degree.

  He didn't expect to see the others again. Three postcards from Ella arrived in the first couple of months. They showed pictures of brilliantly whitewashed houses against an improbably blue sky, clas­sical temples and definitive Mediterranean sunsets. On their reverse sides were tightly written, difficult-to-read messages with excited descriptions and introspective diversions, all thoroughly impersonal. But Lee kept the postcards and pinned them on his wall close to his pill
ow as if they would act as a charm against bad dreams and a remedy for spoiled memories. No more arrived.

  P A R T T H R E E

  March 1986

  O N E

  Crito, we owe a cock to Aesculapius. Please

  pay it,

  and don't let it pass

  —Socrates

  "I dreamt it."

  "It doesn't seem possible."

  "But there it is."

  Ella and Honora, heads together, huddle in secrecy in the pan­elled snug of Belfast's Crown, sipping creamy black stout that left thin white moustaches of foam on their upper lips.

  "But he was never in your bed, or close to it?"

  "Ella, I was dreaming, but I wasn't drunk. I wasn't interested in him. Apart from that dreamthing Brad never got near enough, and neither did anyone else. If it had been Lee things could have been different."

  "I always knew that you had something for each other."

  "I could never have stolen him away from you Ella. He was starry-eyed."

  "But this thing with Brad; it was rape."

  "Yes. At least that's what I thought then, and for a long time afterwards. But he said I could have stopped it if I'd wanted. It was a mind thing, and I let it happen. I've thought about it a lot since. I don't know if he's right."

  "But you were paralyzed; he was stronger and he took advan­tage. It's no different from the real thing."

  "It might as well have been the real thing."

  "That's the part that doesn't seem possible."

  "You see! Even you doubt me! You've had experience of dream­ing, you've been there. You know how it is—but you can't bring yourself to believe that I got pregnant because of something that happened on dreamside. Maybe she was drunk, maybe she can't remember, maybe she just doesn't want to admit it, I've had plenty of time to try them all on. How could I expect anyone else to accept this, if you of all people can't see it?"

  "Honora, I do believe you; I have to believe you. Like you said, I've got some experience of this, but even for me it seems like a long time ago and sometimes I don't even know how much of it was true."

  "It was all true, all right. The pregnancy was confirmed, absolutely. No question of error."

  "But you lost the baby? It miscarried? Was that before or after you took an overdose?"

  "After. It was the pregnancy that made me do it. I was going mad. You don't know what it was like. I thought I might have the baby; then I thought it might be born with two heads or not even human at all. And me a good Catholic girl. At least, I was then. Any­way, the suicide attempt induced the miscarriage. It was finished."

  Ella put a hand on Honora's.

  "You'd best be moving if you really want to catch that ferry. Will you let me know what Lee found out about you-know-who? Though I'll tell you something Ella, I didn't have a bad dream or a repeater while you were here. Maybe they've stopped again after all. God help us, I hope so."

  "I hope so too Honora. Now, no more grieving about lost babies, OK? Promise?"

  "No more grieving. I mean, if she were out there now, she'd for­give me, wouldn't she?"

  "Just try not to think about it."

  "Right. No more grieving."

  "You'll come over to England and see us?"

  "I'll try."

  "I don't want try, I want promise."

  "Perhaps when I get a few days' holiday . . . Easter."

  "Easter. That's a promise and I'll keep you to it."

  Outside the Crown they walked to the car park and kissed, something they would never have done in student days. Age softens as much as it hardens, thought Ella. She got into her Midget and raced back.

  She arrived at Lee's cottage before midnight. He had heard the car and was standing silhouetted in the doorway. The hall was spiced with the smell of the curry which simmered on the stove, a hint of whiskey on Lee as Ella squeezed his hand and went by him into the lounge.

  He poured strong drinks and served up the curry. They caught up in shorthand, then finished the meal in silence. Ella took her glass and sat on the floor in front of the open fire while Lee massaged her aching shoulders. The fire sparked and flickered hypnotically.

  "So it could be him?" Ella said lazily.

  "It could be; he's fallen into a well. I never got near enough to second-guess him. It wasn't the fond reunion. He's been that way so long his face has gone whiskey coloured."

  "But he's had the dreams?"

  "Oh, he's had the dreams all right; there was a very scared Brad inside that alcohol. He made a little speech about unwanted visitors, but I didn't know whether he was talking about me or the dreams."

  "But is he bringing them on? Has he been back there?"

  "That's the question. Whatever it is, he seems to think that they've started to get up and walk. He kept staring out of his win­dow at the empty cottage next door. Looking for enemies.”

  "What did your instincts say?"

  "Too frightened. What about her?"

  "She was definitely holding out on me. I'm sure it's her. She gave me as much of the story as she thought would keep me satis­fied. Rationed it out, right up until the end. But there's more, I'm sure of it."

  "So it's Honora."

  "I could be wrong."

  "It's all we've got to go on. So how was the journey?"

  "I had some bad feelings on the way over. Then when I got to Ireland it was OK. Honora was warm after she'd recovered from the shock of seeing me. It brought a lot of things back."

  "Me too. Seeing Brad, even in that state."

  "It brought back things about us, too."

  "All of it?"

  "Everything."

  Lee kissed Ella's neck. "I never really figured why or how it ended."

  "Well," Ella smiled, "we never really forgave each other for being only human."

  "One day you were gone, then there were three postcards, and then thirteen years had passed."

  "The postcards! I remember trying to fill them with anything but what really mattered."

  They lapsed into silence. Ella felt Lee's loneliness dan­gerously close to the surface.

  "You were never out of my mind. All the years."

  "Stop talking about it. Come here. We can make the years fall away." She smiled again, and put her hand inside his shirt. "Do you remember a certain game we used to play?"

  "Of course I remember”.

  Ella pulled him down on to the rug and they made love. It was clean, hungry sex. They pretended nothing had changed, that they were back in Ella's scented cave and that the amber light from the fire was the dawn breaking through the heavy curtains of their old world. They could be childlike again. They could pretend to be vic­tims of a fold in the ordinary sequence of time, with the intervening thirteen years as a long cold night. Pretending was good, and each could pretend as well as the other, and the game of pretending didn't devour the way that dreaming devoured.

  TWO

  "Ditto, ditto!" cried Tweedledee —Lewis Carroll

  Honora Brennan, still recovering from Ella's unexpected visit, is frightened. She wanders round the house drinking from a glass of stout and swallowing temazepam. In her back room she stands before the covered easel and removes the tablecloth.

  Sitting back on a high stool, she contemplates her work, squint­ing at it through the soft-focus lens of alcohol and tranquilizers which gives the painting a fluid quality all of its own. The canvas shows a familiar scene: a sturdy, spreading oak leaning out across a lake that seems to have no farther shore. But the view is changed in some way, as if Honora has painted a different dreamside, one in the grip of a new authority, which leaves even her guessing.

  Honora covers up the painting before the answer comes to her. She climbs the stairs to bed. The hinge on the gate outside whines and she glances down into the street. A child has climbed on to her gate and is swinging on it, gently back and forth: a girl, a little older than those she teaches at school, neglected, wearing a cut-down dress from a fashion at least a decade pa
st, with lank hair framing sad eyes. The girl looks up at her. Honora draws the curtains.

  Curled up in the dark, Honora wishes that Ella had stayed longer. Maybe she would go to England, and spend some time with Ella. Her visit has turned up buried secrets, memories that sit up and point at her like corpses out of coffins; but it has also brought the warm companionship they enjoyed in the early days on dreamside.

  Honora spends half the night drifting between waking, sleep­ing and dreaming. She is shaken by the wind rattling the window. Ella, Lee, Brad, Professor Burns and countless other voices all take turns at owning the hand that rattles the window, until in exaspera­tion she gets out of bed. Taking a school copy of the prayer book from her bookshelf she levers open the staples that bind it, carefully folding the leaves into paper wedges and forcing them between the gaps of the window frame. She climbs into bed and drifts back into sleep.

  The familiar branches of the giant oak loom large, as if from out of a mist, swaying gently and beckoning her on; she's carried in by the currents. She just goes with it, not part of it but with it, that's all it ever took, all it ever wanted, without struggle or without any more need to help it along, until, breaking into substance like the gentle breaking of an insignificant wave upon a beach it is delivered to you or you to it.

  But this is not the same dreamside. The oak is dead, the willow a cluster of bony twigs in ugly gestures; the trampled grass a crust of hard frost; and the lake itself a solid, frozen feet-thick sheet of ice.

  This is the dreamside that Honora has been visiting these last twelve months, searching for something she doesn't understand. She patrols the lakeside looking out across the frozen water for signs that never come. She walks clear out onto the frozen lake about twenty, thirty yards. Her boot scrapes the sprinkled layer of snow: the ice underneath is a grey paste with impenetrable darkness immediately beneath it.