Miss Mary's Book of Dreams

by Sophie Nicholls

  After the line went dead, Bryony stood for a long time, staring at the phone in her hand. But she wasn’t seeing the phone or the kitchen floor with its black and white chequered lino. What she saw instead was a small girl in a green and white school uniform, sitting on the bottom step of the staircase in her father’s house. The girl’s face was wet with tears and she was sitting on her hands so that they’d stop trembling.

  Above her, Selena hung over the banister, her face contorted. ‘You’re such a scaredy-cat, Bryony.’

  10

  To direct the future: On full moon nights, undress and open all your windows. Take the moon’s silver full onto your body. When you fall asleep after bathing in moonlight, what you dream of will always come true. Full moon bathing has great power. You must rest for three days after this dreaming.

  – Miss Mary’s Book of Dreams

  Zohreh Jobrani woke to a sharp cracking sound at the bedroom window. She fumbled for the light switch, expecting to see the pane shattered by a hurled stone, until she remembered that she wasn’t at the village house in the mountains but in her fourteenth-floor apartment in Tehran.

  She reached for the glass of water on her bedside table and took a gulp, letting the air-conditioned liquid slide down her throat. Her nightdress clung to her and her lips burned on the cold rim of the glass. She waited for her heartbeat to slow itself to the soft hum of dawn in the city far below.

  She’d had the bird dream again.

  Zohreh Jobrani had dreamed this same dream only three times before. The first time had been on the night that her granddaughter, Farah Jobrani, was born; the second time had been in the early hours of that terrible day when Farah’s mother had taken her own life; and the third and last time had been twenty or more years ago now, just before she’d woken to the phone’s shrill ring and heard a distraught Farah – or Fabia as she’d begun to call herself by then – sobbing down the line all the way from England, the terrible news that her husband, Enzo, was dead. Birth and death. The dream – and the bird - seemed to weave them together.

  Now she sat up, clutching the duvet to her chest with one hand and twisting the thick plait of her hair around the other.

  Zohreh Jobrani’s thick grey hair was her last defiance in the face of old age. She stubbornly refused to give in to the idea that long hair was somehow aging and that women in their seventies should wear their hair cropped close to their scalps. Instead, every morning and evening she took the silver-backed brush, which her mother had given her for her sixteenth birthday, and swept it through her hair, exactly one hundred times. In the mornings, she wound it into a neat chignon at the nape of her neck, and in the evenings, after she’d brushed it out with those hundred vigorous strokes, she smoothed it into a single plait that hung straight down her back as far as the waist of her rose-coloured silk pyjamas.

  Now a stray strand of this hair snagged on the amethyst in her signet ring and she winced. What news could the dream be bringing with it this time, this dream that flew through the dark on its red and green wings? What did the bird want with her as its beak opened and she looked straight into its open throat, heard it cry out with its voice that was almost human, before finally hurling itself against the window and falling away again into the night?

  In the corner of the room, she felt the familiar Signals shaping themselves, whispering from the shadows: Zohreh, Zohreh . . . They were strong tonight, and insistent. As she switched off the light again and lay down, they seemed to creep between her pillows, taunting her with a soft hiss: So what will you do, Zohreh? What will you do? What’s to do, to do, to do, to do . . .?

  She lay for a long time watching the slither of sky above the heavy bedroom blinds brighten to white and then silver. By the time the city was fully awake beneath her, she’d already made up her mind.

  She’d been putting it off for months, after all. And now Farah needed her. That much was clear. She could feel it all the way through her body, in the crooks of her elbows and the backs of her knees and that quivering feeling in her stomach.

  She was old. Her hands lying on the cotton sheet were speckled with brown age spots and, as she shifted on the mattress, she felt her hips click and creak. She wanted to see Farah at least one more time before they put her in the ground. And if that terrible girl wouldn’t come here to Tehran – that girl, with all her talk of visas and counter-terrorism laws – then she, Zohreh Jobrani, would have to go to her.

  ‘Maadar,’ she’d said in their last phone call, ‘I want to come. I really do. But you have no idea, the problems I had getting this visa to the States. I’m worried that if I go back to Iran, they won’t let me leave again.’

  Zohreh was a little ashamed now when she thought of her reply. ‘Why don’t you marry this nice man of yours? This David,’ she’d said. ‘After all, you love him, don’t you? Wouldn’t that make things easier?’

  Why had she said that? She, Zohreh, had managed, her entire life, not to marry anyone. She’d gone out of her way to avoid it. And each of her sisters had done the same. They’d remained resolutely single, running the family dressmaking business, keeping the village house, belonging only to themselves in this country where so many women were treated like little more than decorative objects, right until the last. Why should she be telling Farah to do something different?

  She must really be getting old. Old and tired. Perhaps she was finally losing her marbles. Well, then, she would just have to go there. It was easier to talk face to face. She’d be able to see for herself. Assess the situation. Farah had sounded odd. There was a break in her voice that hadn’t been there before.

  She was needed. And it was good to feel needed, after all this time.

  She checked her small gold wristwatch and took her address book from the bedside drawer, flicking through it impatiently until she found what she was looking for. Propped up on her pillows, she punched a number into the phone, frowning at a chip in her French-polished nails.

  ‘Yes,’ she said and she heard her voice sound out in the small room, brisk, practised, professional, without a hint of the concern that she felt fluttering in her chest. ‘Dr Zohreh Jobrani. Yes. Standard class . . . Just as soon as you have availability . . .’

  The Story of the Simurgh

  Zohreh is standing in the courtyard, looking in through the open French doors at the large salon where her grandmother is working.

  She watches as her grandmother takes a long feather and tucks it into the hem of the blue cotton kameez that she’s sewing. The feather is golden yellow, the same bright colour as the yolks of the hens’ eggs that Mahdokht cooked for her breakfast this morning. It flashes briefly in the dim room. She watches from the doorway as her Maadar takes another feather, holds it in the air for a moment, whispers something in Farsi and then sews this feather too into the hem.

  ‘What are you doing, child?’ Maadar never looks up from her work but she knows that Zohreh is there.

  ‘Watching, Maadar,’ she says, running her foot in its new sandal up and down the back of her calf.

  Her grandmother frowns. ‘Come. Come closer.’ She beckons with her thimbled finger.

  ‘What are you making, Maadar? Why are you sewing in feathers?’

  Her grandmother ties off her thread and drapes the half-finished garment over the back of the chair. She crosses to the bookshelf and takes down a large square book.

  As she opens it, the spine makes a cracking sound and a single green feather falls to the floor. Maadar bends to pick it up.

  ‘Look,’ she says, using the feather as a pointer. ‘This is the Shahname, the Great Book . . .’ She turns the pages carefully. ‘And here is the story of the Simurgh, a magical bird with special powers . . .’

  Zohreh is mesmerised by the picture, which spreads over the entire page. The bird is gigantic. It has the head of a dog and the claws of a lion and its wings are covered with feathers in many dazzling colours: red and green and black and gold.

  ‘The Simurgh,�
�� says her grandmother, ‘carries messages between the Earth and the Sky. Whenever she’s hungry, she simply puts back her head like this . . .’ Maadar tips her head towards the ceiling and breathes in deeply. ‘And she draws the wind through the many tiny holes in her beak, like this . . .’

  ‘She eats the air?’

  ‘She does.’ Her grandmother nods. ‘She’s a very clever bird . . . And tender-hearted, too. That’s how she comes to take the Boy Prince Zal into her nest at the top of the mountains and raise him as her own fledgling . . . You want to hear the story?’

  Zohreh nods. She sits down on the floor at the foot of her grandmother’s chair and tries not to stare at the old woman’s bony toes in their plaited leather sandals.

  ‘According to the Great Book,’ her grandmother begins, patting the heavy volume that now lies open on her lap, ‘the son of Saam, Prince Zal, was born with hair and eyelashes as white as snow and eyes as colourless as diamonds. Today we might call him albino. You know this word?’ She fixes Zohreh with a questioning look.

  Zohreh nods. ‘I think so, Maadar.’

  ‘Good. Now, where was I? Ah, yes. So in those times, people thought that when a child was born with such pale looks, there must be some kind of evil at work, a curse, or the work of bad fairies or some such nonsense . . .’ She waves her hand in the air dismissively and makes a soft tsk-ing sound with her tongue. ‘And so when Saam saw his baby son, he was very afraid and he took the poor child from his distraught mother and rode with him many kilometres out from the city and into the mountains, where he left him to die.

  ‘But the child’s tiny cries were heard by the Simurgh, who lived among the highest peaks. With her keen eyes, she saw the tiny baby lying bundled in a cleft in the rocks and she swooped down on her mighty wings and took him in her mouth and carried him off to her nest, where she warmed him and fed him on honey and insects and the fragrant petals of flowers until he was old enough to hunt for himself.

  ‘She also taught him everything she knew, all the wisdom she’d learned from her hundreds of years of dwelling on the mountaintop, from where she could sweep her eyes over the horizon from east to west and see everything. And Prince Zal grew to become knowledgeable and loving just like the Simurgh herself.

  ‘But then the summer came when Prince Zal was a fully grown man and began to long to rejoin the World of Men. He was curious to know what it would be like to live among his own kind. The Simurgh was both saddened by this and also very afraid. She knew that great unhappiness might lie ahead of her beloved adopted son. But she also knew that she must let him go. So when the day came for him to fly on her back and descend into the world from which he had come, she made him a gift of three golden feathers.

  ‘“If you ever need my help,” she said, “you must burn these feathers and, wherever I am, I will see their golden smoke and fly to you.”

  ‘And so Prince Zal returned to his own world, where he was welcomed by his true mother, who had long ago abandoned hope of ever seeing him again. When he appeared in her doorway, she recognised him immediately and was overjoyed that, not only was he alive, but he was also such a fine, strong and handsome young man, with a wisdom beyond his years. It wasn’t long before many of the families of the nobility began to come forwards to offer their daughters in marriage.

  ‘But it was the beautiful and gentle Rudaba who enchanted Zal. She had golden skin and golden hair and there was something about her kindness that reminded him of his second sky mother. They were married in a simple ceremony and Rudaba was soon with child but, when it came time for their son to be born, her labour was long and terrible. From the birth chamber, she cried out in such agonising pain that Zal was certain that he would lose her.

  ‘So he took the feathers from the place where he carried them, inside the lining of his embroidered coat, close to his heart, in a special pocket he’d had made. He laid them on a golden dish and lit them and soon the smoke from the feathers was curling up around his shoulders, fragrant with snow and honey from his old mountain home.

  ‘And then, at the window of the birth chamber, the Simurgh appeared, her wings outspread and shimmering with a thousand colours. She perched on the windowsill and spoke to Zal in her calm clear voice, whilst all the time Rudaba writhed in pain on the bed.

  ‘The Simurgh ordered him to fetch fresh water and showed him how to clean a knife and how to make an incision in Rudaba’s swollen belly and take out his child as easily as taking a stone from a ripe fruit . . .’

  Zohreh shudders. ‘How terrible.’

  Her grandmother looks at her and smiles. ‘In fact, how wonderful. For otherwise Rudaba and her little baby boy would have died.’

  ‘It was a boy?’

  ‘Yes, and they named him Rostam. And he grew up to be a great hero. But that is another story. Now, where was I? Oh, yes. They say that, when Zal lifted his son in his arms, the first thing that the baby saw was the Simurgh, perched on the windowsill, her beautiful wings outspread, and the baby’s eyes widened to see the many colours of her feathers all shining there in the moonlight – green and red and blue and black and gold . . .’

  ‘And what happened to the Simurgh, Maadar?’

  ‘Oh, no one knows for sure, my dear. But sometimes, I’m certain that I hear her, drawing the wind through her beak, like this . . .’ Her grandmother tosses back her head again and some of her long white hair comes loose and tumbles over her shoulders.

  ‘And that’s why you’re sewing the feathers into this kameez? Just like Prince Zal carried them, for protection?’

  ‘Maybe, child. Maybe . . .’ Her grandmother presses a finger to her lips. ‘But this must be our secret. Yes? Just yours and mine? You must never tell anyone else . . .’

  And Zohreh never had. But she had always loved the story of the Simurgh, carrying it close, just as Zal had carried his feathers against his heart.

  Who was she, Zohreh had often wondered, the wearer of that blue kameez, and did she ever discover that the feathers were there?

  Years later, when Farah had sent her a copy of her first programme from Paris – with that photograph of herself in the racy costume made of nothing but emerald-green crystals and feathers and inscribed with her new name – the first thing Zohreh had thought of was the Simurgh with her iridescent wings.

  And when Farah had phoned to tell her about Grace’s birth and how Ella had laboured so hard to bring her into the world, Zohreh had thought again of Prince Zal, Rudaba and Rostam and the kind-hearted bird watching over them from the windowsill, its wings outspread.

  ‘She will be a very great person, this little girl,’ she told Farah. ‘It is an auspicious way to enter this world. Be sure to tell Ella that.’

  *

  Fabia Moreno looked at the person behind the desk. She raised an eyebrow, arranged her lips into a smile and watched as this girl, who must be no more than eighteen and had chewing gum wadded in the corner of her cheek, clicked her little mouse thing – clickety-click – and ran her fingers through her long, lank hair and squinted again at her screen.

  ‘Sorry, ma’am. I just can’t get you on a flight this week,’ she was saying. ‘And definitely not by Wednesday. I can put you on standby . . .’

  Fabia sighed. It was an inward sigh, a sigh that no one else in the cramped travel agents’ office would have heard. In fact, anyone who cared to pay attention would have seen that Fabia’s lipsticked smile only became a little more polished and her perfectly groomed eyebrows rose a little higher.

  But inside her, a tremor of disappointment travelled up her spine. It was a cold, blue-grey, the colour of her disappointment, but even as she stood there it began to change, to sharpen at the edges into irritation.

  ‘Check again,’ she said, her smile tightening.

  ‘I’m sorry, ma’am?’ The girl pushed her hair out of her eyes and stared at Fabia.

  ‘Check again. Would you, please?’

  Fabia ran her tongue over her teeth,
gripping the edge of the desk. But even as she sat there, among the fake potted palms and the piles of glossy brochures, she knew that she wasn’t actually annoyed at this silly young girl with her chewing-gum habit. She was annoyed at herself. Now that she’d finally made up her mind, it seemed that it was all too late. She’d wavered for too long.

  And then somewhere among the many things that began to jump and circle in her mind, a single thought broke away from the rest, forming itself into a perfect shape. A certain kind of shape, to be exact. The oval shape that was sewn into the lining of the pocket in the coat that she happened to be wearing right now. Her lucky charm, the polished bit of metal, a little like a lopsided moon, with the funny engraved lines across its surface. The charm that she’d carried with her everywhere, in her pocket or her purse, for more than twenty years, from the day that she’d found it in the garden at Maadar-Bozorg’s village house. She felt for the edge of it now through the thin cotton of her coat, tracing it with her thumbnail.

  And then she looked again at the girl behind the desk.

  ‘I hope I didn’t sound rude,’ she said. ‘It’s just that it’s terribly important. Are you absolutely sure there’s nothing at all? I don’t suppose you would check just one more time?’

  The girl barely managed to hide her impatience. ‘Sure, but this screen updates every thirty seconds. I don’t see how –’ And then her finger paused on the mouse. She looked up at Fabia and shook her head in disbelief. ‘Well, I’ve never seen that happen before. Must be your lucky day. A seat has just this minute come available.’

  Fabia smiled and reached in her handbag for her purse.

  11

  Betrothal dream: Bathe in the light of the waxing moon in a bath strewn with rose petals. Then dress by candlelight in a nightdress of pure white cotton and place a sprig of rosemary under your pillow. In the morning, the first man you see will be the man that you are going to marry.