Dreamside Page 3

  He drove his car as close as he could to the front door. On a wooden plaque on the wall, weather-split and almost completely effaced, Lee could just about discern the word Elderwine, He sighed, less than happy that he'd found the place.

  He switched off the engine and killed the lights. He sat for a moment, hoping that someone would appear. Then he got out of the car and went to the door. No one answered his knock. He tried again, waited, and pushed at the handle. The door swung open; a pile of unopened envelopes lay on the mat. They were addressed to Brad Cousins. Lee went in.

  F I V E

  For years I cannot hum a bit

  Or sing the smallest song;

  And this the dreadful reason is,

  My legs are grown too long!

  —Edward Lear

  Ella, meanwhile, found her prey with relative ease. The ferry journey, the disembarkation and the drive down to Fermanagh had gone smoothly, and she was soon walking unchallenged through the doors of the primary school. Through a glass window in a classroom door she saw the woman she sought.

  Honora Brennan was gathering up stubbed-out paint brushes and jam jars of murky water, offering words of encouragement after an end-of-day paint your fantasy session—yes anything you like, the sky the trees the stars at night. Is that the stars at night, she says to one seven-year-old with a pink NHS eye patch, no he says it's the mortar that got me da, is it she says, put it in the pile with the others and wash out your brushes in the sink. On instinct Honora looked up and saw Ella watching her.

  Briskly, she dismissed the class, then turned to rinse the paint-pots as if by this chore she could make the other woman disappear. Ella willed her to turn around: Don't block me out Honora. If Hon­ora heard the words, she fought them.

  "Yes, I'm here; you're not dreaming."

  Honora stiffened, stacking the pots in a precise pyramid.

  "How did you get here?" Her back still turned, she scrubbed at an already gleaming jar.

  "You can still get a boat across the water."

  "I'm sorry, Ella. I wanted to say 'It's lovely to see you' but I didn't feel it."

  "Then you were right not to say it."

  Honora busied herself thumb tacking the children's paintings to the wall. Ella waited.

  "Do you know why I came?"

  Honora looked into her eyes for the first time. "Can't we go somewhere?"

  Outside, walking side by side in their thick winter coats, Ella was surprised when Honora gently linked arms with her. She remem­bered that type of endearing, girlish gesture so well; that, and a fresh smell of camomile and rainwater. Honora's tawny hair fell as it always had, into a tight nest of curls and ringlets. She exuded a vul­nerability that made Ella, by contrast, feel coarse.

  They went to a small tea shop and peered at each other. The window was misted with condensation. Every time someone came in or left, a door-shaped wedge of cold air sent a shiver around the seated customers. Outside a UDR soldier with his cockade feather erect patrolled by with that circumspect hip-swivelling security walk. Ella watched him.

  "After a while you stop seeing them."

  "Are we talking about soldiers?"

  "What else? They look like shadows; but they're real."

  "And what about the real shadows?"

  Ella flattered herself that she always knew when someone was dissembling. She had an idea that she could peer, if not into a per­son's darkest heart, then at least into the blue or grey or green of their eyes, where she might detect the microscopic splash imperceptible to others. Honora dropped her eyes and tried to change the subject.

  "You gave me the fright of my life when I saw you outside the classroom. I never expected to see you again, least of all here. It sud­denly brought it all back to me. How we were and all that. Weren't we crazy then, Ella? Wasn't it all madness?"

  "Oh yes, it was that all right."

  "But it's grand to see you. Really it is."

  "I wish you meant that." The remark made Honora look away again. "You know why I came to see you."

  "You want to talk to me about dreams?"

  "We could talk about the IRA instead. Or the Mountains of Mourne. Or about Donegal tweed . . ."

  "All right, all right. So, let's talk about dreams. I'm happy to talk about dreams, if that's what you want me to talk about."

  "I want to talk about the kind of things that happened to us while we were at university. I mean, if anything like that has been happening to you lately."

  "Oh, come on Ella! Don't you think I didn't have enough with what happened at the time? I put it all behind me. I was glad to get away from it when I had the chance. And now it's all in the past."

  "It's not in the past. It's back and it's not nice."

  "But don't you see what it is!" Honora cried. "Just this talking about it is what does it. You're dredging it all up again. Why can't you leave it alone? The more you want to discuss and analyze and toss it back and forth the more you bring it all back again. It was a mistake, something we did when we were young. It's something we shouldn't keep going back to; like an old—"

  "Like an old affair?"

  "Something like that."

  "Lee said some very similar things, about not wanting to open it all up."

  "Well, he's right. Me and him both."

  "But he's a different kind of person. Remember what we used to call the repeater? He's been having some of those dreams again. Only it's not a joke any more. Some mornings it's panic . . ."

  "Are you living with Lee?"

  "No, but I know what you're thinking, and you're wrong. We didn't get together and resurrect this dreaming thing. It started happening to both of us independently. I got frightened, so I got in touch with Lee. That was when I found that the same things were happening to him. I'd already decided that one of the original cir­cle was muddying the pool; so if it wasn't me and it wasn't Lee . . ."

  "You thought it might be me."

  "I had to come and find you, at least. You can understand that, can't you?"

  "Yes, I can understand it."

  Dusk had rolled over the street outside the tea shop. A hand switched on dim lights. Now half of Honora's face was in grey shadow, the other half washed by unhelpful amber light. Another patrol passed by the misted window.

  Ella was still trying to get Honora to pick up the ball. "So you haven't been troubled by any of that . . . weird stuff? No repeaters. No flashbacks. None of it?"

  "Not at all." Honora's eyes were too wide open to be telling the truth.

  "Never, over the years?"

  "Not since what happened at university. For a year or two after that I did have the occasional nightmare, but that was more of the regular order of bad dreams. If you want my opinion, I'm glad I can't help you. It's dead and gone, and I'd like to keep it that way."

  Honora said all of this too cheerfully, working a fraction too hard at trying to keep it light. She was smiling at Ella with those delicate features, but now she was looking like a toy left out in the rain. Yes; there was a pallor under the skin left by the sleeping pills, Ella could guess that; but most revealing were the very fine lines, a tiny chain of folds in her skin which she saw as knives, daggers turned inwards on the subject.

  "And over the years you've never had any contact with—"

  "None." Honora cut Ella very short. "I don't even want to think about him, far less talk about him. Can we pay this bill?"

  Ella sat back.

  "I wasn't going to ask you to stay," said Honora with a smile, "but I can't really not, now can I?"

  "No, you can't really not. We've got a hundred other things to catch up on."

  They threaded their way through the streets of the town, Hon­ora once again linking arms with her old friend. Her house was a two-up two-down brick terrace, its interior painted in bold primary colours. It was almost obsessively tidy, except in the back room which was cluttered with the unframed canvases and rolls of cartridge paper which Honora used for painting and drawing.

 
"In the summer I still go into town and paint portraits for American and German tourists," Honora explained. "And some­times I get commissions to paint people's pets. Dreadful!"

  "Stinking!" Ella agreed brightly.

  One painting rested on a chair, draped with a chequered table­cloth. "Can I see?" Ella asked. But Honora ushered her gently out of the room and switched off the light. Ella suddenly knew exactly what lay under the cloth, as if she herself had splashed it on the can­vas in luminous paint.

  "What would you like to do while you're here?" Honora asked hurriedly.

  "You mean apart from talking about dreams?"

  Honora looked defeated.

  "Why did you lie to me, Honora? You never used to lie."

  Honora turned to the window. "All right, the dreams have been back. I don't even like talking about it. I don't know what's happened, why the . .. repeaters are frightening me again. I hadn't expe­rienced them for over ten years. I thought you must have been doing something, perhaps you and Lee, cooking something up together, resurrecting the dreaming. I thought you might want to include me in some scheme or other . . ."

  "I told you; Lee and I don't want it any more than you do."

  "Oh I realize that now. But I just want to black it out, hide somewhere, not talk about it, not think about it. When you came I thought: Oh God no, this is why the dreams have been coming back, leave me out of it."

  "Do you think us coming together can make things worse?"

  "I don't know anything; it just triggers a lot of... associations."

  "The point is, if it's not you or Lee or me, then it must be . . ."

  "Yes. I was afraid of him. My God Ella, what's happening to us?"

  Ella didn't answer. "We should go out tonight," she said, trying to brighten things.

  "I never go out."

  "You do this evening. I want Guinness and didley-didley music, and you can show me where to get it."

  All protests were brushed aside, and Honora, who an aston­ished, high-spirited Ella later discovered hadn't been outside her house socially for two whole years, was dragged out in a state of excitement and nervous terror mixed. When they left the house it was snowing; soft, light flakes of snow falling under the amber streetlamps, melting the instant they touched the ground.

  S I X

  If we swallow arsenic we must be poisoned, and he

  who dreams as I have done, must be troubled

  —William Cowper

  Elderwine Cottage, damp and stinking. Stooping to gather a fist­ful of letters franked more than a fortnight before; Lee yelled some­thing intended to be Hallo or Anyone In but which came out unintelligibly between. Off right, a narrow hall of razor-edged shadows admitted to a room with a bare light bulb burning. He carefully nudged open the door. It was ankle deep in newspapers and litter. Some of the papers were unread and folded neatly in piles, some had obviously served as wrappings for a variety of take­away foods. Judging by the smell, some still did. Floating in the debris were dozens of brown ale and whiskey empties, bottles frozen neck-up in a polluted lake. In the next room he tried flicking on a light switch for a bulb that was missing. He passed through to the kitchen. A tinker's workshop of pans and dishes was stacked high in the sink which was full of grey water, a half-inch slab of grease on the surface; rock-hard doorsteps of sliced bread grew fibrous green beards; disposable fast food cartons were left strategically, still offer­ing half of their original contents; milk bottles stood with their con­tents crusting in phases of metamorphosis. It was more like a biochemist's laboratory than a kitchen.

  "Brad Cousins!" He climbed the creaking wooden steps and found upstairs two cold empty rooms with generations of paper stripping itself from the walls. Downstairs again, he took a second look in the back room with the broken light. There was a man asleep on the couch, he looked like a bundled sack, roped and tied at the top.

  "Is that you Brad?" he said loudly. The sack didn't stir, but he knew that he had found his man.

  Brad Cousins slept on, his jaw slack and his mouth open, a string of saliva swinging from his chin to his T-shirt like a delicate piece of suspension engineering. A pair of scuffed placeless brogues was kicked off at the end of the couch, adding to the general stench of lived-in nylon socks. From matted head to swollen foot, the sleep­ing body exuded a root odour, and a sweet-rotten scent of sweat and alcohol commingled.

  "Brad. Brad, it's Lee. Lee Peterson."

  One crimson-cupped eye opened. Lee found himself talking as though through a drainpipe. "Brad. I've come a long way to see you. I've come to talk to you, Brad. We have to talk. All right?"

  The bloodshot eye glazed over, an inner protective membrane forming across it.

  "Brad. I want you to listen, Brad. Can you hear me? There are some questions I need to ask you."

  The eye closed. "No, don't go to sleep again, Brad. I don't want you to go back to sleep. Brad. Brad. Wake up, Brad."

  This time both eyes opened and with a startling marionette movement he jerked himself upright on the couch. His eyes were like glass beads fixed on Lee. Finally he got up and lurched unsteadily out of the room. Lee heard him go out through the back door and then heard the clanking mechanism of the backyard toilet flush. He returned without a word.

  "Brad. Listen to what I'm saying—"

  "You have my permission to stop talking to me as if I'm in a coma," Cousins interrupted. "If I'm not saying much right now it's because I'm conducting a lively debate with myself. Interior dialogue. If the better half of me wins the debate, I'll go back to sleep. Then when I wake up you won't be here and I'll feel much happier."

  "Don't count on it."

  "OK, so why are you here? Let me run the options. I borrowed half a quid from you when we were students and you've come to get it back. No? Your marriage is on the rocks and you want some advice from your ol' mate Brad Cousins who always knew how to handle women. Yes? Or you need a career break and you want me to use my position to pull a few strings for you, is that it? Eh? Well I don't have half a quid, I never give advice and my influence is on the wane. You wasted a journey. You can go." He leaned back and closed his eyes.

  "Just came to have a little talk with you, Brad."

  "Are you still here? I thought I was only—"

  "Dreaming?"

  "What do you want?" Brad scowled play-time over.

  "The booze doesn't keep the dreams away, does it?"

  Cousins got up and wobbled over to the other side of the room, steadying himself against a heavy oak sideboard. "Away at bay I pray they stay."

  "You're still pissed."

  Cousins drew a circle in the air and punctured it with a nicotine-dyed finger. "I'd forgotten how telepathically perceptive you were."

  "Do you sleep well?”

  "I sleep like a baby log. Thanks."

  "No bad dreams?"

  "Ah! Dreamscreams?"

  "Any repeaters?"

  "Dreameaters?"

  "Ever go back^ there?"

  "Dreamscare?"

  "You like this game?"

  "Why not. How long can we play?"

  "How long can you keep it up? How long can you go on pre­tending?"

  "You were always boring; did I ever tell you that? Always bor­ing."

  "Why won't you talk about it?"

  "It. What is it, exactly?" The cabinet door in the sideboard had lost its handle. Cousins expertly prised it open with his fingertips. He lifted out a third-full bottle of Scotch and a dusty, gluey-looking tumbler with a long human hair, probably his own, stuck at the rim.

  The whiskey splashed into the tumbler as if it were Cola. No companion drink was offered. "It is an unappreciated visit from an unwanted past. It appears when you're least expecting it, and when you least want it. It comes when you are asleep, when you thought you were enjoying yourself, defences down, getting in the zeds. It knows that it's not welcome, but it sits there uninvited in your com­fortable squalid little nest with its ridiculous mouth open asking for answers to ques
tions."

  "I can't say that age or booze has had a mellowing effect on you."

  "Mellowing? Spare me. You've come to discuss my spiritual development."

  "People like you don't develop; they ferment. I've come to talk about dreaming."

  At that last word, Cousins moved to the window, glass in hand. He leaned against the window-sill and peered over at the neighbouring tumbledown cottage. "No, don't change the subject. Really. I'm always interested in your observations concerning my moral and social progress. Who will you be reporting back to, I wonder."

  "I've seen Ella, if that's what you mean. That's why I'm here."

  "How is the old slag? Has she slept her way to prominence? Good luck to her and all who sail in her." He seemed to have spotted something and leaned toward the window.

  "What about you?" Lee trying to be barbed in return. "Did you ever see Honora Brennan again?"

  Cousins tried to spit out the hair that caught in his mouth. He kept his back turned as Lee spoke. "You know why I came here. Someone's been stirring things up. Now either you've been back there muddying the water, or if it's not you, then at least like Ella and myself you've been caught in the backwash."

  "What can I do against such dazzling logic?"

  "You can drop the act; you're as frightened as we are."

  "Aw, shaddup."

  "What are you afraid of? Don't want to be reminded of what happened back there? Don't want to remember your special part in it?"

  "All right! All right! I did go back there as a matter of fact. I didn't want to go. In fact I tried bloody hard not to go. I spent night after bloody night fighting to keep it away. But it was too strong. It got so I was afraid to go to sleep at night, because I knew what was going to happen. I used pills to stay awake for three or four days, and then when the inevitable happened I didn't have the strength left to resist it." He turned to face Lee across the room. "You wouldn't rec­ognize the old place now: they've got penny arcades and fat lady shows, and hot-dog stands and end-of-pier comedy acts. It's quite a tourist pull these days; you should get Ella to go down there with you for the bank holiday."