Sweet Dreams

by Tricia Sullivan

  CA: Just after half-eight.

  DC: You fell asleep about the same time?

  CA: I actually may have fallen asleep before her. She entered her first dream cycle at about eight-thirty. I have notes of all this in my dream diary.

  DC: How can you keep a diary while you’re sleeping?

  CA: It’s an acquired skill. I use my AR piece to record brain patterns and keep a notepad open for the meta. Because I’m a lucid dreamer, I can make notes and maintain the dream at the same time. Unless the dream gets really hairy.

  RP: Can we see the notes?

  CA: They’re confidential. Client privilege.

  DC: You’re not a doctor or a lawyer. You’re going to need to turn over those notes. If you don’t give them to us, the police will take them off you.

  RP: What’s that guy doing out there? Is he trying to get in?

  CA: I know him! It’s OK, let him in before he wakes the whole neighbourhood—

  Stranger: [shouting, possibly in Portuguese]

  [LOUD BANGING AND THUMPING NOISES]

  DC: Who is this maniac?

  RP: I’m letting him in before he wakes Serge.

  CA: Antonio, calm down.

  Antonio: How I am being calm when police are blaming me, your English pig police want to deport me or maybe just shoot me in the head. Don’t touch me!

  DC: We don’t deport people. We’re the—

  CA: They’re not immigration officers. They’re only Scully and Mulder, Antonio. It’s cool.

  Antonio: You come with me, Charlie, she is lying there dead, I am a broken man. Come, Charlie—

  RP: Sorry, mate, you can’t— Oi!

  DC: [unintelligible]

  CA: Hey! Hey, oi! Fuckity shit fuck, guys, stop hurting each other. Fighting is bad! STOP IT!

  [END RECORDING]

  Why

  ‘That’s enough, break it up!’

  Donato is on the ground under Antonio with his legs wrapped around Antonio’s waist. They are hitting each other even as they crash into the legs of chairs. Laminated menus slither down from the counter and rain on them.

  Goodcop aka Roman Pelka is trying ineffectually to pull Antonio off Donato Cruz aka Badcop. Roman is neither large nor strong, and his relationship with his own body is kind of like my dad’s relationship with that drone he tried to put together without an instruction manual and ended up drop-kicking into a carp pond in rage.

  ‘Sergio!’ Roman yells, and then takes an elbow to the mouth as Antonio pulls an arm back unexpectedly. ‘Sergio, some help?’

  The kebab shop’s been closed for hours, and Sergio headed to his flat upstairs after our last round of food and drink. He locked up but didn’t close the security grille, which is how Antonio spotted us and then hurled himself at the door yelling accusations in Portuguese. This was too much for Roman, who opened the door, which was maybe unwise of him.

  Now Sergio comes thumping downstairs barefoot in trackies, his hair all messed-up, carrying an axe-handle. He takes in the scene, shouts something in Turkish and then wades in.

  Roman retreats, blood streaming from his nose.

  ‘Please don’t break Antonio’s face!’ I cry. ‘Will no one think of his looks?’

  While the three of them are huffing and grunting and knocking down furniture, I grab some paper napkins and pass them to Roman.

  ‘Keep your head back,’ I tell him. ‘I’ll look for some ice.’

  While I’m finding ice behind the counter, Sergio is separating the two combatants. Antonio is flushed and gesticulating wildly but Donato doesn’t even appear winded. He brushes off his trousers and shirt.

  ‘There was no call for any of that,’ Donato says to Antonio, darkly. ‘We’re not the police. We’re not detaining Miss Aaron. And if you’re back on the streets already then there’s no reason to think anybody will accuse you of murder. Let alone shoot you.’

  There’s a crushed chip stuck to Donato’s arse. I have the urge to pluck it off but restrain myself with a mighty effort. Instead I give a tea towel full of ice to Roman. His upper lip is swollen somewhat attractively.

  Antonio reaches for me. Sergio extends his axe-handle, blocking Antonio from touching me.

  ‘This is not worth it for me, bruv,’ Sergio says to Roman. ‘You guys better find another place to do business.’

  ‘I pan bet oo Addenal tiggeds,’ Roman says, head back, ice on face.

  Sergio looks at him uncomprehendingly.

  ‘Arsenal tickets,’ I fill in. ‘He can get you a season pass.’

  ‘I nebber ded a deedon badd!’

  ‘Didn’t you? Sorry. He can get you tickets, Sergio, but a season pass is beyond his powers.’

  Sergio grunts. He and Donato pick up chairs and generally put the room back to rights.

  I turn to Roman, lean on his arm while the other two shout at each other. I feel like green jelly.

  It’s been a very long night.

  Once it was clear that Mel really had walked off the roof, I kind of lost my moorings. An ambulance came, and I waited in the lobby with Antonio as he paced, and cried, and punched a wall, and then the concierge had to bring him an ice pack. It’s all disordered in my mind, so I’m not clear what happened when. The police came. There were cups of tea. I spilled mine while giving a statement to a nice woman in uniform, and she ended up holding the cup for me while I drank. One of the desk clerks put a blanket over my shoulders and I felt foolish. Nothing happened to me. It’s Mel, broken, in an ambulance, but even that is wrong. Ambulances are for the living.

  I didn’t cry, though. I kept saying I felt responsible, but the police constable didn’t write any of that down in my statement. She held my hands between hers for a moment after I signed my wobbly signature. Asked who she should call to come and get me. And that’s when Roman turned up, standing over us with his fists in his jacket pockets and a bowler hat on his head that hasn’t been in fashion for at least eight years. I didn’t know his name at first, of course, but he introduced himself and the constable – Yemisi – she knew him and she explained to me that he was an expert in technological crime and she got up and he sat down and I blurted, ‘She didn’t kill herself. Someone killed her from inside her head.’ That seemed to get his attention and the next thing I knew Roman and I were meeting Donato in a Stratford kebab shop and Donato was doing his ‘this is an official interview’ schtick amidst the Saturday-night rush of punters leaving the pubs and going for kebabs. Surreal doesn’t really begin to describe any of it.

  Now Antonio has evaded the efforts of Sergio to stop him, he flings his arms around me.

  ‘They think you killed her! I don’t want anything terrible to happen to you, too, Charlie.’ He starts sobbing into my shoulder.

  ‘This isn’t Argentina, mate,’ says Donato, and I reply stiffly, ‘My friend comes from Brazil. Not all South American countries are the same.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m aware of that, Ms Aaron. The Met don’t beat people into giving confessions. We’re only talking. Calm down.’

  ‘Calm down?’ Antonio roars. ‘Are you—?’

  ‘Why not have some chips,’ says Roman in that soft, mellow way he has. He’s got up off the floor undismayed and smiles at Antonio even though Antonio must have loosened a couple of his teeth just now. Antonio ignores him and grips my body tighter.

  ‘Thank god I found you. O didn’t want to tell me where they’d taken you, but I insisted.’

  Of course, O will have been tracking me all this time.

  ‘You know it wasn’t me, right?’ I sound breathless partly because he’s knocked the wind out of me, and partly because he’s just grabbed my backside and lifted me off my feet so as to press me into his giant erection.

  ‘I know it wasn’t you,’ he whispers into my hair. ‘I’m sorry I got you into this mess.’

  ‘Antonio. Put me down.’ He puts me down but doesn’t let go. He’s quite tall, and the head of his penis nudges my rib cage.

  I clear my throat and disengage, a little
weak at the knees.

  ‘Sorry,’ Antonio says. ‘I just—’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He takes a pocket pack of tissues out of his jacket and blows his nose. He folds the tissue neatly but his hands are trembling.

  Roman says, ‘Please take a seat, Antonio. So glad you came. We’d like to talk to each of you one at a time.’

  ‘One at a time! One at a time!’ Antonio points at each of them with a kind of random violence. ‘That is what they do when they want us to turn on each other, Charlie! Don’t say anything else. I’m calling you a lawyer.’

  ‘Actually,’ I say, ‘I think I am going home now.’

  Donato glares at me. ‘We’ve barely got started.’

  I try to glare back. Confrontations terrify me. I can’t look Donato in the eye without thinking how he’s going to grab me by the throat and then they’ll throw me in the back of their blacked-out 4X4 and take me somewhere secret, like an abandoned mental institution, and torture and kill me, and I’ll end up on the bottom of the Thames. Eel food.

  ‘Donato, you’re scaring her,’ Roman says. He seems a decent enough sort, but Donato doesn’t take him seriously at all. I wonder if it’s because he’s not in the best nick. Donato obviously works out a lot. The backs of his shirts are all stretched in the shoulders, whereas Roman’s are stretched in the belly. Donato swings his arms, kicks a chair and walks over to the counter. He leans on it as if he’s a morally tortured character in a Dostoevsky novel. I can almost see the thought bubble over his head: Why do I have to put up with these idiots?

  I pick up my bag and put on my hoodie.

  ‘I’d like to go home now, please,’ I say. It’s odd. No matter how angry I am, I’m always polite and I never raise my voice. Mulder and Scully probably have no idea how, if this were a video game and I had, say, a giant laser bazooka, I would line them both up against the wall and make them grovel apologetically for putting me through all this when it wasn’t necessary. Then I’d blow a hole in the ceiling of the kebab shop, just for laughs. As long as no one was upstairs, of course. I’m not a sociopath.

  But I don’t have a bazooka of any description. I have a bag full of romance novels and post-surgical bras needing alteration. And I am trying very hard not to cry again.

  ‘I will take you, Charlie. That’s why I came, to extract you safely. Not to talk to these pigs.’

  Sigh. ‘They’re not police, Antonio. They work in tech crime. I’ve been helping them, and maybe you should, too. For Mel’s sake.’

  Antonio is so handsome that even when he’s in a terrible state – like now – he’s still quite edible.

  Donato says, ‘If you have nothing to hide, then there’s no harm in talking to us. We can deal with this very quickly—’

  ‘Talk to your friends the pigs! They asked me a thousand offensive questions—’

  ‘Pardon me, Doctor Pelka,’ Sergio adds, looking pained. ‘You are good customer and I don’t want no trouble but this fighting is not part of our understanding. I think you better go.’

  There ensues a lot of back and forth with Donato issuing re-assurances that don’t sound particularly convincing and Antonio working himself up into a froth. I’m feeling sleepy again. I need to go home.

  ‘Do you think the police will want more from me?’ I murmur to Roman. After all, they kept Antonio all night. The boyfriend is always the prime suspect, but if people start to connect the dots about my past relationship with Antonio, they might think that he and I did it together. It does look kind of dodgy, even if neither of us was in physical contact with Mel at the time. He hasn’t done either of us any favours by grabbing my arse just now, of course.

  ‘They may do,’ he says. ‘Don and I are going to want more from you, anyway. We’ll be asked to make a report. Anytime AR is involved in an incident, the Met call us.’

  I must have made some sort of involuntary sound or twitch, because he hastily adds, ‘Not that I’m saying you had anything to do with this! Only that a full workup needs to be done.’

  ‘So you guys are really, really legit, seriously?’

  ‘’Course!’

  ‘The kebab shop is just . . . what, where you like to hang? I mean, do you always interview people here?’

  ‘Sometimes we do it on the bus or in the park,’ says Roman.

  ‘In the park? That’s so—’

  He laughs. ‘Pathetic? It’s also a way for us to avoid being tracked digitally. We’re aware that when we’re hunting criminals, they are also hunting us.’

  Pretty deep for a man with a grease stain on his lapel.

  ‘So I could ring up Scotland Yard and they’d be like, oh, Roman and Donato, they’re always interrogating people in public places, pish! Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Well, they might not say “pish”. It’s not a term people actually use. Except you.’

  He tries to restrain his smile, but it breaks over his whole face.

  ‘I will take you home, Charlie,’ Antonio says, giving me a smouldering look. ‘I call the cab.’

  Donato doesn’t argue about it. It says a lot that Antonio the yoga instructor has the money to call a cab while the Dream Police got me here on a series of Big Green Buses. As the cab takes us to Finsbury Park from Stratford, we talk haltingly. I find out that Melodie’s parents are flying in from Canada, that the police are reviewing CCTV footage from the hotel and cross-referencing with everyone’s Spacetime footprints.

  ‘I was in the lift when she fell,’ Antonio whispers. ‘I was looking for her.’

  I hold his hand.

  ‘At least you were looking,’ I say. ‘I was asleep. I was supposed to protect her but I couldn’t.’

  The good thing about the kebab shop interview was that it stopped me dwelling on what had happened. I didn’t have time to think while they were asking their clueless questions. Now the weight of the dream comes crushing down. When I remember the Creeper, a jolt of electricity runs through me.

  ‘What did O say?’

  ‘Not very much. She is so cold. She didn’t care when I told her how I was interrogated. The police want to pin this on me, I can feel it.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s pretty fucked-up.’

  ‘Charlie, do you mind if I put up some mental scenery? I feel like I need something to lift my spirits. The gloominess, it’s too much right now.’

  ‘Sure, of course.’

  ‘You are on BigSky? OK, we share. I have the road to Hana on Maui, an imaginary ice planet with friendly penguins – you will like them, they are cute. Also a country road from South Yunnan Province. What have you got?’

  ‘Nothing but the beta version of an environment Shandy’s working on. It’s called Patios of the Rich and Famous, but that doesn’t sound as good as the penguins.’

  ‘Ice planet it is. Engaging sled drive.’

  As the taxi wends its way across London, we schuss across a high plateau on the ice planet of Yon (yes, that’s really the name, commercially registered and approved by BigSky’s_Oxbridge numpties crack team of marketing experts). The penguins waddle alongside us but they can’t keep up, so they sort of take a running start and then glide on their bellies, whee! Super cute. The sky is deep violet studded with multicoloured stars and there’s a line of dark green sea just visible beyond our snowy plateau. Our sledge is being pulled by seven fat reindeer with strings of fairy lights in their antlers. Unlike real reindeer, they don’t flash their bumholes when they run. Apart from that, I find it convincing and a huge improvement on East London. Sorry, Hackney.

  ‘So, no visible bumholes: pro or con?’

  ‘Con, of course,’ Antonio says. ‘This is an imaginary planet, but if we are to believe we’re really there, the animals should be realistic. No anus, no excretion, no reality.’

  Antonio has such a lovely accent that he even makes ‘anus’ sound romantic.

  ‘I think it’s a good thing. AR is supposed to be an improvement on reality. And maybe they excrete some other way.’

  ‘In
that case they should not look like reindeer. They could be reptilian or insect or something even more alien.’

  ‘Like a Puffle?’

  ‘Or a Tribble.’

  ‘They could have more fur, I guess,’ I say. ‘As a cover-up.’

  ‘More fur would be fine with me.’

  ‘I never had you for a realist, Antonio.’

  ‘I am very much the realist. Wow, did you see that? A shooting star!’

  As the taxi stops at lights, we admire the meteor shower on the alien planet generated by Antonio’s Spacetime. I am in this safe little world with him, don’t have to look out of the cab window at the real London. Don’t have to think about the person assigned to wash the blood off the pavement where Melodie fell while the morning traffic starts up and London goes on without her.

  Don’t have to wonder how the Creeper did it. Or why.

  Penguins are good.

  Antonio sees me into O’s building and then jumps back in the cab to teach his first Movement Art & Science class in Mayfair. I trudge up the stairs and stand outside O’s flat fumbling with my keys; the door opens from inside and O is there in her wheelchair.

  ‘It will upset you greatly to hear this,’ she informs me. ‘But the business line has been flooded with enquiries. It seems that Melodie Tan’s death has worked in your favour.’

  I shut the door behind me. O wheels to her workstation and starts giving me the rundown.

  ‘No, stop it, O!’ I say. ‘My client has died. I can’t. I just can’t hear this right now.’

  ‘Of course, darling. Naturally you’re upset. Shandy’s been trying to reach you. I told her that you’re safe and not under suspicion—’

  Perhaps I make some sort of involuntary noise because she stops and asks, ‘You’re not, are you? Under suspicion? You’ve been in Stratford, not in cells.’

  I tell her about the Dream Police. She asks a lot of questions about Antonio’s behaviour, which in my view is the least of it. But I answer them. I’m getting used to answering questions.

  ‘You’ve had enough for one night,’ O concludes. ‘We’ll talk further after you’ve rested.’

  Again I’m go to bed as London wakes. But first, I can’t help checking my Spacetime, just to see what I’ve missed while I was with the Dream Police.