(1989) Dreamer

by Peter James

  She fell out of the car, stumbled onto the pavement, and ran back to the news vendor. ‘Standard,’ she said, grabbing the paper, pulling her purse out of her bag, fumbling, trying to open it, rattling the coins, spilling them around her. Then she stopped, oblivious to the stinging iciness of the rain, and stared down at the front page headline.

  163 DEAD IN BULGARIA AIR DISASTER

  Underneath was a photograph. The tail section of the aircraft, a dark silhouette resting on snow, the top of the tail-fin bent over at a right angle and part of the Chartair prancing tiger emblem clearly visible with letters next to it.

  G.Z.T.A.E.

  Chartair Six-Two-Four, she mouthed silently to herself, watching the newsprint darkening from the rain.

  ‘Bulgaria has confirmed that a Boeing 727 belonging to Chartair crashed this morning with the loss of all 155 passengers and eight crew. Full details have still not been released, but the plane is believed to have crashed into mountains whilst trying to land in poor visibility.’

  She did not need to read any further. Turning, she walked slowly back to the waiting car.

  She knew exactly what had happened.

  ‘What is it?’ dimly, she heard Ken’s voice. ‘Sam? . . . Hallo? . . . Anybody home?’

  She pulled the Bentley’s door closed, and stared again at the headlines and the photograph.

  ‘What is it, Sam? What’s the matter? Do you know someone on that plane?’

  She looked ahead blankly, then pulled her handkerchief out of her bag and wiped the water away from her face. She felt more trickling down her cheeks and wiped that away too. Immediately they were wet again. She closed her eyes tightly, felt her chest heaving and sniffed hard, trying to stop the sobbing, but she could not.

  She felt Ken’s hand, tender, lightly on her wrist. ‘Who was it?’ he said. ‘Who was on that plane?’

  She sat in silence for a long while, listening to the rain and the sound of the traffic passing by.

  ‘Me,’ she said. ‘I was on that plane.’

  5

  ‘Up their bottoms.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘It’s true. They do.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  Richard picked up his wine glass, grinning drunkenly, and swirled his wine around. ‘They stick gerbils up their bottoms.’

  ‘Honestly?’

  Sam watched Sarah Rowntree’s bright pampered face through the silver candelabra. The lights of a boat slipped past the window; she could hear the faint throbbing of its engine above the chatter.

  ‘They put them in plastic bags then stick them up their bottoms.’

  ‘I can’t believe it!’

  A draught of cold air, stronger than the others, bent the candle flames, and she watched the light dancing off the diamonds, the cutlery, the glistening cheeks. Friends. Dinner parties. She loved giving dinner parties.

  Normally.

  Her favourite way of entertaining. Cocktail parties were a hassle: small talk, good for prospecting business, that was all. Supper parties were as bad. You ended up perched on the end of an armchair, attempting to eat from a paper plate, with a dip on the side that didn’t fit your wine glass, a paper plate that was always too small and bent when you tried to cut your ham and dumped your food on the floor if you were lucky and in your lap if you weren’t.

  Dinner parties were the civilised way. A few friends. Good food. Good conversation.

  Normally.

  Not tonight.

  Tonight nothing fitted. Neither the food, nor the guests, nor her dress which was driving her nuts. The bouillabaisse starter had mostly disintegrated. Harriet O’Connell announced she had become allergic to fish, blaming pollution, and Guy Rowntree said he didn’t eat garlic, so they’d split the one avocado she’d found in the fruit bowl.

  The venison looked as if it had been cremated. The juniper berries in the casserole had fused into a thick, bitter sludge and the sauce had separated, drifting around on top like an oil slick.

  And how the hell was she to know that juniper berries murdered claret?

  It was Archie, on her right, who told her, informed her, lectured her. Archie Cruickshank – You’ll like Archie – he’s a good boy . . . a big player – a real wine man, know what I mean? – Archie with his wide blotchy face and his veins popping out, his fat belly and his pudgy fingers and his nose inside his wine glass like a pig sniffing for truffles. Archie had bored her and Bamford O’Connell, sitting on her left, rigid with vintages. ‘’78’s much better than the ’83.’

  ‘Oh really?’

  ‘Oh yes, absolutely. Shouldn’t be drinking these ’83s for at least another five years.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘The ’82s are very underrated. Depends on the grower, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  He held his goblet up to the light and peered at it, keeping it at a distance as though it contained raw sewage. ‘Pity about the claret. Assertive little wine, the ’62. Should have been drunk a year or two ago, of course – but ruined by the juniper berries anyway. Give it such a metallic taste. Surprised Richard didn’t warn you about that.’

  ‘Yes, well, he’s full of secrets.’

  ‘Thought he was a bit of a connoisseur?’

  She felt a breeze blow again, and sensed the huge medieval iron chandelier above them move a fraction. She looked up. It had light bulbs now, turned down low, in place of the thick candles it had once held. Then she looked along the table at the guests: at Andreas, down towards the far end, near Richard. Andreas Berensen, the Swiss banker who sat, hardly talking, watching, smiling silently to himself as if he was above all this. Tall, stiff, athletic-looking, in his late forties or early fifties, a cold, rather correct face with a high forehead, his fair hair neatly groomed each side of his head but thinned to a light fuzz on top. And a black leather glove on his right hand which he had not taken off. He picked up his wine glass and drank, caught Sam’s eye, gave a smile that was almost a smirk and put his glass back down.

  She felt the cold shiver again. The same cold shiver when he had come in the door and shaken her hand, shaken it with the black leather glove. Like the glove in the dream. Daft. Don’t be daft.

  Christ.

  So much was churning through her mind. Guilt. Anger. I could have saved them she’d said to Ken, and he’d looked back at her gently and told her hundreds of people had dreams about air disasters and there was nothing she could have done; told her that if she’d rung the airline they’d have treated her the way they treated hundreds of cranks that called them every week.

  But the anger raged on inside her. Anger and bewilderment.

  Why? How? Did I really dream it?

  The back of her dress was making her angry too; she couldn’t get it comfortable, couldn’t get it to sit right without pulling in one direction. She wriggled her shoulders, tried to ease the back up. She’d already gone out, once, to her bedroom, and ripped out the shoulder pads. Now she felt she wanted to go and put them back in. She wriggled her shoulders around again and felt the label scratching the base of her neck.

  Archie shoved the rim of his Sauternes against his damp lips, tilted it and made a noise like a draining bathtub. A thin rivulet of wine dribbled down onto his tie. He had food all over him as well. She wondered if his wife dumped him in the washing machine when they got home. ‘This is good,’ he said condescendingly. ‘Really quite good indeed. Gets mugged by the trifle, of course.’

  She glanced at Bamford O’Connell, sitting on her left. One of Richard’s oldest friends. With his raffish, centre-parted hair, his crimson velvet jacket and ancient yellow silk bow-tie, he looked more like an Edwardian dandy than a psychiatrist. His wife, Harriet, frumpily bohemian, who always looked as if she ought to be wearing sandals even when she wasn’t, was sitting in the middle of the table, lecturing Peter Rawlings, a stockbroker, on ecological responsibility. Green Awareness.

  ‘You see all we are is sponge, we’re just sponges,’ she informed him in her shr
ill, earnest, church bazaar voice. ‘We absorb our environment like sponges.’

  ‘There’s a Futures market in sponges,’ Peter Rawlings murmured.

  It had been a mistake putting them next to each other. They had nothing in common and he was looking bored. She wished she had him on her right instead of Archie Cruickshank who was now slouched in his chair, staring thoughtfully at the ceiling and making an unpleasant slurping sound.

  Archie. Every business had its share of ghastly people who had to be – teeth-clenchedly – tolerated, humoured, fawned over. She had her share too. Like Jake, the copywriter.

  Sucking up, they called it at school. Nothing changed. You went through life sucking up. Then you arrived in heaven, clutching your notebook full of credits, like Aunt Angela, for the Biggest Suck Up of all. Hey God, that was a great place you made. Only seven days? Wow. How did you do it? You made a few little booboos, but they’re minor really they are, didn’t matter – well, OK, it would have been nice if you hadn’t taken my Mummy and Daddy and dumped me with two of the most miserable people you could find, it would have been nice if I hadn’t had four miscarriages and then nearly been killed by my little Nicky, and if you hadn’t nuked Hiroshima. It would have been nice if my husband hadn’t bonked that little—

  It would have been nice if that aeroplane hadn’t crashed.

  Her throat tightened and her stomach knotted with fear. It seemed suddenly that the volume control in her head had been switched off, and she could see everyone but not hear them.

  She felt icily cold. Alone.

  163 DEAD IN BULGARIA AIR DISASTER

  Everyone in the room had stopped in freeze-frame. Then the movie started again. Her ears felt hot. Boiling. Archie began to eat his trifle. Other than lecturing her on wine he had asked her nothing about herself except to inquire how many children she had, three times so far. His wife, with peroxided hair and enormous boobs, was at the far end of the table trying to wrest Richard’s attention away from Andreas. She looked more like a stripper than the wife of a banker.

  ‘This is wonderful trifle, Sam,’ Bamford O’Connell said in his rich Dublin brogue.

  ‘Thank you.’ She smiled, and nearly blurted out, ‘Actually it’s Marks and Sparks,’ but just managed to stop herself. It had worked fine. She had taken it out of the container and bashed it about a bit.

  A short, compact ball of energy, with a wildly expressive bon-viveur face, O’Connell attacked another spoonful with gusto. He made life seem like a feast, whether it was eating, drinking, talking, or even sitting. Absorbed in studying others, he gave the appearance that life seemed a treat, an endless supply of pleasures. Catching her eye, he raised his glass. ‘A little toast to you for all your efforts.’

  She smiled again, and wondered if he could see her face reddening. He was quick, full of charm, and razor sharp beneath his mask of eccentricity. She could never forget that he was a psychiatrist, was always conscious of every movement, every gesture she made in his presence, wondering what it signalled to him, what inadequacies, what secret yearnings, what secret fears she was beaming out from the way she cut her food or held her glass or turned and touched a friend.

  ‘Alive?’ said a voice down the far end. ‘Are they alive?’

  She glared at Richard to change the subject, but he looked away, exchanged a poorly camouflaged grin with Andreas, then looked at the blonde. ‘Yah, of course. Apparently when they wriggle around, it’s very erotic – if you like that sort of thing.’

  ‘I think it’s disgusting,’ said Sheila Rawlings.

  ‘I bet you get worse things than that told to you by your patients, don’t you, Bamford?’ said Peter Rawlings, abandoning Harriet in a cloud of environmentally hostile cigarette smoke.

  O’Connell smiled and caught Sam’s eye, showing her he understood. He turned his glass around in his hands. ‘I do. For sure I do.’ He winked at Sam. ‘That’s why we put our patients on couches – so they can’t see our faces when they tell us these things.’

  ‘Who does this thing with gerbils?’ said Archie’s wife, her eyes wide open, eyelids batting like beaks of hungry birds.

  ‘Gays in America,’ said Richard.

  The phone rang.

  Richard jumped up, walked across to his desk and picked it up. There was a silence for a moment as everyone watched him.

  ‘Harry, gorgeous!’ he said loudly. ‘Fine, darling, it’s a good line. No, I haven’t – had to leave early . . . yah . . . it’s definitely going to be a new ulcer drug. Unwind the hedge. Sell the warrant if you’ve got a natural buyer at a 10% premium to the ADR. What about Sony?’

  ‘Richard,’ Sam called across. ‘Can’t you ring him back?’

  He covered the mouthpiece, and raised a finger.

  Bamford O’Connell pushed his tumbling hair back away from his forehead. ‘There’s no peace for the wicked,’ he said to Sam.

  ‘Fifty-five and a half, did you say? What’s the FX rate?’ He tapped out a series of numbers on his calculator, then glanced at Andreas. ‘Yah, okay, go for it. Buy me 150,000 shares’ worth. Bye, darling. Talk to you tomorrow. Bye.’ Richard hung up, switched on his Reuters terminal and tapped on the keyboard.

  Sam glared at him furiously.

  ‘Richard—’ Peter Rawlings said. ‘Where’s IBM trading?’

  ‘Hang on a sec.’ Richard tapped the keyboard again. ‘Shit, New York’s going bananas.’

  Archie looked round anxiously, then back at Sam, clearly tempted to go and see for himself but thinking better of it. Only Andreas showed no concern; he sat staring ahead, sipping his wine and smiling a cold, contented smile. Maybe Swiss bankers knew it all long before everyone else? Considered English money men to be their puppets?

  ‘Bid 124 5/8. Offer 125 7/8,’ Richard shouted out, then looked quizically at Andreas. Andreas gave him a brief nod of reassurance.

  Sam got up from the table, conscious of the eyes on her, and walked over to Richard. ‘Turn it off,’ she hissed. ‘At once.’

  ‘I want to see if we’re pushing the stock.’

  ‘I don’t care. I want it off. Now.’

  She marched back to the table, all smiles, and started to clear away the pudding bowls.

  ‘Can you get the cheese, please, Richard?’ she said, carrying a stack out to the kitchen and putting it by the dishwasher. She switched the coffee percolator on. Richard followed her out with the rest. ‘Brilliant bouillabaisse,’ he said. ‘That was seriously moreish.’

  ‘It was dreadful. The venison was a complete disaster. Why’s that man Andreas wearing a glove?’

  ‘Always wears it.’

  ‘It’s creepy.’

  ‘It’s all right. I think he’s had some accident – got an ugly scar on it, or something.’ He put his hands on her shoulders. ‘You’re very uptight, Bugs. Relax.’

  She shook herself free and tinned to face him. ‘You’re very drunk.’

  ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘You’re behaving appallingly. Embarrassing everyone. We’ve had to put up with you wittering on about gerbils up bottoms, with your lecture on how Catherine the Great died being screwed by a horse, and with your going off and sitting down to work.’

  ‘And you’ve been like a stuffed dummy all evening. You’re not chatting; you’re sitting at the end of the table staring into space. Don’t you feel well?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘You look bloody awful. You’ve been looking white as a sheet all evening. I think you should see the quack.’

  ‘I told you, I’m very spooked by that air disaster.’

  ‘Oh come on, Bugs, you haven’t turned into a fucking oracle.’

  She glared back at him. Strangers. Two complete strangers. She could no more talk to him about anything important these days than talk to someone she met on a bus. It would be easier to talk to a stranger on a bus. She turned and went back into the room. Richard sat back in his place, and the blonde immediately oozed towards him. ‘Have you ever tried it with a gerbil?’ sh
e said.

  He lit a cigarette and inhaled loudly. ‘No. Sam doesn’t go in for kinky sex too much.’ He saw Sam’s face and looked away hastily. ‘Actually, she’s too busy dreaming these days.’

  ‘Wildly erotic ones?’

  ‘No – all about aeroplanes crashing. Reckons she dreamed about the one that went down in Bulgaria today.’

  Sam caught Andreas’s eye again; caught the cold, almost knowing smirk.

  ‘I reckon she was dreaming of my penis. Hey, Bamford,’ Richard shouted. ‘Didn’t Freud think aeroplanes were schlonkers?’

  ‘Aren’t you going to offer any port, Richard?’ she said, trying to articulate clearly, hoping they couldn’t hear the quavering in her voice.

  Bamford O’Connell turned to her, and smiled a sympathetic smile that told her not to worry, not to be upset, that Richard was a fine chap really, and was just a bit sozzled.

  ‘Port, ah, yes. Got some really good stuff. Warres ’63. Archie?’

  ‘Delicious cheese, this creamy one,’ said the banker’s wife in an equally creamy voice.

  It comes from the breasts of fat blonde women she heard a voice in her head saying, and had to bite her lip to avoid blurting it out. ‘Cambozola,’ she said tartly, then remembered who she was, why she was here, and put on her forced smile again. ‘Nice, isn’t it?’

  ‘How’s the stately home coming along, Sam?’ said O’Connell.

  ‘It’s hardly a stately home. It’s just an old farmhouse.’

  ‘I thought it was quite historic, with a ghost or something?’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Moving, are you?’ said Archie, his sudden interest startling her.

  ‘We used to have a little weekend cottage and we bought something a bit bigger, but it got quite badly damaged in the hurricane.’

  ‘’Tis a good idea to get away from London,’ said O’Connell. ‘Have a break from the muggers.’

  ‘The country’s full of muggers, too,’ said Richard. ‘They drive around on tractors.’

  Sam fetched the coffee and began pouring it out. O’Connell passed the cups down for her.