I run backstage, calling Mel. It’s a maze of passageways, and the farther I go the more I see body parts lying around on the floor. At first I think they’re stage props, but there is a smell, too. It’s nothing like Mrs Haugh-Wombaur’s farts. It’s primitive, blood and faeces and fear.
I find the orchestra’s dressing room. There’s another door inside, left ajar. Cold, fresh air comes in from outside. I open it expecting a fire exit, but when I step out I find myself on a scaffold. I reel to a stop, grabbing a support pole.
Somehow we’ve got somewhere very high up. Higher than any theatre, higher than the hotel where Mel dreams. Higher than anything in London; but I shouldn’t be surprised, because we’re not in London any more. This is the Dream City for sure. I’m nervous to find myself here while responsible for a client. I guess there’s a first time for everything.
I need to be careful now. The Dream City’s a tricksy place. Must orientate myself. I look around, straining my senses for some hint of where Mel has got to. The scaffold looks down on a neon-lit flyover with cars spooling silently across it, and below that a network of canals and lesser buildings sprawls. The skyline is aggressively broken by the silhouettes of cranes, like praying mantises.
‘Mel?’
Where has she got to? What is this place? If it’s really some kind of collective entity, then who built it? And where is it really located?
What’s hardest of all to describe about the Dream City is the way it takes hold of your imagination. I know I should be looking for Mel but I’m distracted by the architecture. I see gardens set on the sides of buildings. I see hang-gliders drifting in slow spirals from the highest towers towards the water below. I see tiny windows all lit up. There must be millions of people here.
‘All of this is mine,’ the Creeper says in my ear. ‘If you come here, you’re at my mercy. Remember that.’
I snap out of my reverie and try to turn around because I want to know if the Creeper is greyscale or colour out here in the Dream City. If it’s greyscale, then I’m dealing with another dreamer using the Sweet Dreams platform – which I’m now starting to suspect may be the case. If it’s colour, then it’s just some part of Mel’s consciousness. (Unless the Creeper is bloody lucid like me, which I don’t want to think about because bad implications.)
I need to know more about this entity; I need to make myself look. But while its voice is in my ear, I can’t seem to move. I’m still standing in the doorway, and now from the dressing room behind me I hear water running. Then a muffled soprano cry. With a great effort I manage to turn around, step back inside the dressing room and slam the door on the Creeper and the Dream City. Where is that sound coming from? It’s a rushing, echoing sound of water.
‘Mel?’
My hand is still on the door handle. When I was outside, it sounded like the water was in the dressing room. But now I’m inside, it sounds like the water is outside – but how can it be? There was nothing but scaffolding out there.
I put my ear to the door. No doubt about it: rushing water. I stand back and look again. Now there’s a universal trousers/skirt symbol for a unisex toilet printed on it.
I pound on the door. ‘Melodie! Melodie, I’m coming in!’
Yet I hesitate. What will be in there? What is the person in Mel’s dream capable of doing?
I know one thing. Whatever it is, I’m stopping it.
I turn the handle and go in. It’s not a tiny bathroom like you’d expect in a theatre. It’s a huge marble affair, like the one in her hotel suite. She’s on her knees by the side of the bath. The Creeper is standing over her, holding her head under the water. She’s struggling. It looks over its shoulder at me, and suddenly the Creeper isn’t a masked man in a black suit. It’s Mel herself. There are two of them: the one in the water, and the one holding her in the water. The Creeper Mel is covered in blood and her eyes are staring. Still forcing the real Mel’s head down with one hand, Creeper Mel stretches the other out towards me.
‘Is this what you want to happen?’ the Creeper says. But now it speaks with Mel’s voice. ‘Don’t interfere,’ it says as blood pours down Creeper Mel’s face. ‘You’ll get me killed.’
Then the Creeper does something it shouldn’t be able to do. It boots me out of the dream. I wake up.
The pigeon sisters
The hotel room is freezing. Someone has turned the air con all the way up. Still bleary, I stand and call Mel’s name. I go to the bed, reaching out to shake her. She isn’t there. The bedclothes are all twisted, half on the floor.
‘Mel! Are you OK?’
Bathroom door. Closed. Water running.
Now I’m frantic. I pound on the door. I call her name. Nothing.
Antonio comes staggering in from the next room, eyes half-closed in that adorable way, hair all mussy. The things I notice at a time like this. I actually do disgust myself.
‘The door is locked,’ I yell at him. ‘Do something!’
He pounds on it.
‘She’s probably just taking a shower,’ he says. ‘She does that when she gets anxious or has nightmares. What do you want me to do, break it down?’
‘Yes!’
‘This is a hotel. I can’t just—’
‘Break it down, Antonio, or I’ll call 999.’
‘I knew I was a fool to ask you for help,’ he mutters.
‘What’s the matter? Not strong enough to break it down?’
He waggles a finger at me. ‘Oh, no. You can’t trick me with your gender stereotypes, Charlie. Why don’t you break it down?’
‘Antonio, please. I’m scared. Just break it down. You know I’m weak.’
He looks at the door like it’s a bull and he’s a matador. Then he shakes his head. He can’t seem to convince even himself that he can do it.
‘How do you want me to break it down? Should I use my shoulder?’
‘I don’t know! You go to the gym five times a week. How hard can it be?’
It takes him several tries. We are both shouting her name and pounding on the door in between charges. I keep hoping she’ll open the door and Antonio will go whizzing through and this whole scene will turn into something out of a Pink Panther movie.
At last the door flies off its hinges. It shoots inwards and collides with the commode. The bathroom looks exactly the same as the one in Mel’s dream. She’s on her knees by the bath, which is full. And her face is in the water.
‘Melodie, what are you doing?’ Antonio grabs her by the shoulders, pulls her out of the water and steadies her head with one hand. Her neck is floppy. Her eyes are shut. Is she still asleep?
I slap her across the face and call her name. She chokes, coughs, retches. Pushes us both away. Vomits water on the floor.
‘I’m phoning for an ambulance,’ I say, rolling my eyes up to go for 999 on my earring, but Antonio waves his hand in front of my face, snapping his fingers to distract me.
‘No,’ he says.
‘No? Are you crazy?’
‘You don’t understand, Charlie. The media follow her around. This can’t get out. Look, she’s OK. She’s breathing. She’s waking up. It will be OK.’
Melodie is breathing in big, noisy gulps of air, punctuated by harsh coughs. He turns off the tap, pushes the sodden black locks off her face, gives her a towel. She doesn’t look frightened so much as shocked. Like she doesn’t know where she is.
Suddenly I feel knackered. I back away slowly.
‘You saw him,’ she gasps. ‘Charlie, you saw him, didn’t you? You stood up to him. Thank you.’
I’m shaking my head. ‘I didn’t . . . I tried, but just when you needed me most, I woke up.’
‘It’s a good thing Charlie woke up,’ Antonio tells her, dabbing at Mel’s shoulders with the edge of the towel. ‘You must have been sleepwalking again.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Her chin is wobbling.
‘There’s nothing for you to feel sorry about!’ he says, and kisses her. I study the complimentary bath products. Fr
ee shower cap. Aromatherapy stuff to spray on your pillow to help you sleep. Ha! As if. I shouldn’t mock people with insomnia; it’s just that when you have the opposite problem you feel jealous. I yawn.
‘We will talk tomorrow, Charlie,’ Antonio says.
I want to ask Mel about the Dream City, about how the Creeper tricked her into the bathroom – what the whole experience looked like from her perspective. But she has a deer-in-headlights stare. Maybe Antonio is right.
‘How are you going to get through the rest of the night, Mel?’
Before she can answer, he says, ‘I will sleep in front of the bathroom door just in case.’
‘Oh, I’m not going back to sleep,’ she says. ‘Not after that. I’m going to practice.’
I leave them arguing about it. Then I fall asleep on the Tube and wake up all the way out at Heathrow Terminal 5. Feeling like lost luggage.
* * *
It’s dawn again as I stagger home. O’s previous housemate Jez has picked her up at the Whittington and escorted her back to the flat. Jez is still in the flat, unfortunately, hunching over a tablet with O on the sofa. Jez is wearing a multicoloured hat she knitted herself, a charity-shop pencil skirt and a giant sweatshirt that says Harvard on it. I’m told she went to U of Bedfordshire but flunked out her first year.
‘How do you like this one?’ Jez asks O, clicking through to a photo. ‘It’s the Andy Warhol line.’
The photo shows Jez posing in a pair of wellies decorated with a portrait of Chairman Mao. I go through to the kitchen to make us all a cup of tea. Edgar the cat is hiding behind the kettle.
‘Jez, you do know you have to pay for the rights to use this art?’ O is saying.
‘Yes, but I’m thinking to go in with the V and A. I’m an ideas person. They can put up the investment. They sell postcards and T-shirts with great art on them. Why not wellies?’
‘Darling, I just can’t see the V and A selling wellies in their gift shop—’
Jez lets out a peal of laughter. Edgar runs behind the toaster. ‘It’s online, ducks, online. eBay? V-market? Squirt? It’ll be massive in Japan and all.’
‘Did you just say “ducks”?’ I can’t help myself. Maybe Ducks is a new app I should know about.
‘Oh, hello, Charlotte,’ Jez says. ‘Didn’t see you there. How’s your business going? O said you had to run out for an important meeting.’
I bring in the tea, trying not to make a face. ‘I wouldn’t really call it a business.’
‘Well, it keeps you in toffee, evidently.’
Toffee? Ducks? I try to catch O’s eye but she’s avoiding me. She knows what I’m thinking: Jez is a lunatic. O must have been desperate to have rung her, which makes me feel all the more guilty that I didn’t stay.
‘Well, I’ve got this thing going with the great masters of modern art printed on wellies. For the gardening set. And as novelty gifts. So I’m just putting it out there, this is my baby. Nobody better steal my idea. O said you were working with a patent lawyer, Charlotte. Make sure you don’t plant it in his subconscious while he’s dreaming.’
‘No worries,’ I say, sniffing the milk doubtfully. ‘The patent lawyer is no longer a client.’
Jez purses her lips, which gives her fishface. ‘Sorry, darling. Have a toffee.’
While they are drinking tea, I escape to the shower and then my room, where I run a search. I play with a lot of terms – Dream City BigSky collective unconscious greyscale people Sweet Dreams committing suicide dreams more than one version of self dream canals dreams scaffolding – just free-associate and let it run. I make a mental note to ask Shandy if she knows anything. She’s only a junior virtual-furniture designer, but BigSky is one of those post-geek companies that’s low on hierarchy and big on collaboration. If the Dream City has something to do with the planned addition to BigSky’s Sweet Dreams platform, Shandy might have got wind of it.
My searches yield nothing useful, but they distract me from Jez’s inane chatter and pretty soon I’m asleep. When I finally drag myself out of bed, the afternoon is spent and Jez is gone. O is sat at her display with Edgar on her knees and a cup of tea in her good hand.
‘O, I’m not as flaky as Jez, am I?’
O whuffles a laugh into her cup. ‘Sure you can handle the truth?’
‘But seriously. When she lived here. Were you two . . . were you tight?’
‘Did we have an affair, do you mean?’
‘Pffft, what? Oh wow – did you?’
‘Even coming from you, that is absurd. Please get a grip.’
‘I just meant, were you mates, did you hang out like we hang out, you and Jez and Edgar?’
Hearing his name, Edgar flexes his claws against O’s knees and blinks his green eyes in feline acknowledgement of my existence.
‘I do believe you’re jealous.’
‘I’m not! Honestly, I know it sounds like that but I’m not. Anyway, it was before my time so why should I be jealous?’ I’m digging myself in deeper and deeper. ‘I guess my question is, do you think Jez is all there?’
‘Mentally? She’s not the sharpest pin in the pincushion. Is that what you mean?’
‘Only I wondered . . . you know, if she’s the sort of person you tend to have in as a flatmate, then on some level would it imply that I’m . . . how can I put this . . . ?’
‘That you’re not very bright? Or that I think you’re not very bright, and you feel insulted?’
‘Something like that. Sorry.’
‘No,’ says O, still staring at her data.
‘No?’
‘I used different selection criteria for you.’
‘Oh.’
I wait for her to elaborate, but she says nothing for such a long time that I almost fall asleep. I don’t dare ask another question because O doesn’t take well to being ‘hounded’, as she calls it.
‘I selected you because you’re naive. Also a Pollyanna.’
Ooh, that stings. I mean, just because I don’t enjoy enabling men to sexually dismember their business colleagues in dreamspace, that doesn’t mean I’m a Pollyanna. Does it?
‘Take for example this nonsense about Antonio and the contraception. How on earth could you fall for that?’
‘I don’t know. I’m very ashamed. In my defence, he is really, really hot and I was in a vulnerable place.’
‘You’re always in a vulnerable place, darling. Look at how you walk around with those big cow eyes, with that soul-searching way about you. You might as well be carrying a sign that says “Take advantage, I want to be messed with”.’
‘Have you been talking to Shandy?’
‘And you can’t go the rest of your life using Shandy as a stick to beat back people who want to hurt you. So that’s my honest answer, Charlie. I picked you because I thought I could help you. It’s a tough world and you need tough dreams. Now. I would be eternally grateful if you made me a nice cheesy pasta. I need comfort food.’
I feel terrible. ‘But enough about you, O, moaning away over your trip to A and E and demanding painkillers. Let’s talk about me and my existential angst.’
She chuckles. I put water on to boil, get out a lump of cheese, scrape off the dodgy bits and start grating it. ‘Go on, then. Tell.’
‘Only a bad sprain. They gave me Percocet but I don’t want to take it. Bungs me up.’
‘I think you should take it and forget the cheesy pasta, or you really will be bunged up. I’ll make you a salad or something.’
‘Are you my mother?’
‘Did she track your bowel movements?’
O coughs and I hear her shifting herself into the armchair. ‘So I take it you got the client.’
‘She is very interesting. Do you know anything about sleepwalking?’
‘She sleepwalks, too? Is that the problem, or . . . ?’
‘No, the problem is a complex in her dream. It manifests as this horrible murderous dude. I just feel . . . I want to make sure I’m not missing something with the sleepwalkin
g. I don’t know that much about it.’
‘I used to do it when I was small,’ O says. ‘My parents had to put an extra latch on the door up high because one night when I was about four they found me out in the front garden.’
‘Do you remember what it was like?’
‘Only the one time. In my dream, I was lining up my brother’s toy trains in numerical order in their sheds, and then I started to wake up and I realised I was in Mum’s spice rack instead, moving around the bottles. She found me and guided me back to bed. Apparently I’d colour-coded everything.’
I smile.
We eat in companionable silence, each of us checking our messages at the table. It’s what I love about O. As old as she is, she’s always au fait with the latest tech even if she hates BigSky with the passion of an ex-lover (or, in her case, ex-funder). My mum would be appalled at our lack of manners, but if you ask me, a real friend never minds if you’re in the Cloud when you’re having a meal with them. We can’t see or hear one another’s AR so a fly on the wall would see two people living in private bubbles, laughing, gesturing, talking or even weeping completely out of sync with one another. I could never do that with my parents, but O is different.
If neither of us has much going on, we sometimes have a funny video duel across the table by candlelight. I’ve been known to message O while I’m on the couch and she’s in her bedroom. It feels more polite than knocking on the door. I mean, what if she’s having a wank or something? It just makes sense.
Over salad, she sends me a link about sleepwalking.
‘Was pootling around the Imperial alumni website and found a mention that might help your client if it turns out your therapy doesn’t do the trick.’
‘Oh? Lost faith in me so soon?’
‘An old contact of mine from Imperial works for a start-up nanotech company. They can activate and deactivate switches that control your brainwaves and neural gates when you’re sleeping. They’re studying an AR-modulated drug that can disable your muscles when you’re asleep. The brain is supposed to do this on its own, to stop you acting out your dreams, but it fails for some people.’
Sweet Dreams Page 6