(1989) Dreamer

by Peter James

‘Travel may bring surprises. Avoid arguments today, however much a close colleague may irritate you. Both today and the weekend will be unsettling and may tax even your very strong inner resources.’

  Thank you very much. Hope you have a nice day too. She put the paper inside her briefcase, closed the door behind her and walked down the dark hall, four floors up in the cold stone building that was still at the moment in the middle of nowhere. Another few years and there would be a thriving metropolis all around: colour, light, people, shops. Right now it was a mess; it was hard to tell what they were putting up from what they were pulling down.

  She went out into the street, into the light that was a brighter shade of grey, into the smells of diesel oil and burning tar and the salty tang of the river. She felt the faintly gritty taste of dust in her mouth and heard the distant clatter of a train, the hissing of pneumatics, the rumble of a cement mixer.

  Horoscopes. Who cared about horoscopes? Who cared about dreams? About light bulbs?

  The grey E-Type was covered in a light coating of dust that had settled on it since yesterday, and their elderly Range Rover next to it had virtually changed colour under the stuff. She climbed into the Jaguar, pushed the key into the ignition and switched it on. The red warning light appeared and the fuel pump ticked furiously. She pushed up the choke lever and pressed the starter button.

  The engine turned over several times, whining, snuffling, then fired with a sharp bang, and rumbled into life. The rev counter flickered wildly then settled down. She flipped down the screenwasher toggle, switched on the wipers, pushed the stubby gear lever into first, struggled with the handbrake, then gripped the thin wood-rimmed steering wheel and eased the car forward, listening to its engine sucking and grumbling like an old man woken from a comfortable sleep. The three small wipers smeared the salt and dust into a translucent film, and she gave the screen another squirt.

  She heaved on the wheel, pulling out around a parked lorry into Wapping High Street, then released it, feeling it spin through her hands so fast she had to be careful not to let it burn them. Old things. Retro. Ken’s idea. Heavily into retro. Run old cars as company cars. Smart image, good investment. She stopped at the main road, waiting for a gap in the traffic. A bus stopped in front of her, blocking her, and she glared at the driver who was looking fixedly ahead; like a carthorse in blinkers, she thought angrily.

  Then she saw the poster on the side of the bus, staring her in the face as if it was taunting her, silver with an aeroplane and a blue prancing tiger, and the words boldly emblazoned.

  ‘CHARTAIR – A GREAT LITTLE AIRLINE . . . NOW A GREAT BIG ONE!’

  7

  She parked and hurried across Covent Garden towards her club. There was just time for a quick swim. She tried to swim every morning before work, unless she had an early meeting or was travelling, and she wanted to swim badly today, to try to wake up some more, to clear the fuzziness out of her head.

  She felt a bit better as she left the club, slightly more human but not much, walked down the narrow street and across the huge open square, past the old covered market building of Covent Garden, among the pigeons and the street cleaners who had the place to themselves for another hour yet. A gust of cold icy wind whiplashed her damp hair, and a piece of paper scudded along past her feet like a wounded bird.

  DREAMS!

  The word rippled through the glass of the shop window.

  UNLOCK YOUR OWN SECRET WORLD!

  DREAMS. DREAMS. DREAMS.

  The window was filled with books on dreams.

  DREAMS – YOUR MAGIC MIRROR.

  THE POWER OF DREAMS.

  THE A–Z OF DREAMS.

  One of the small alternative bookshops she passed every day without noticing. She glanced at her watch, 9.20. She tried the door and was faintly surprised that it opened. She went in and the shop was filled with a crisp, pristine papery smell. New jackets, fresh print; it was a good smell. Books. She loved books.

  A tall man in a black polo-neck glided noiselessly across the floor, his head swivelling from side to side like a robot. He stopped a few feet from Sam, inclined his head and raised his eyebrows. He looked clean, scrubbed, and smelt of organic soap.

  ‘Dreams,’ said Sam. ‘I’m—’ She felt flustered for a moment. He was making her nervous. He was the sort of man she should be asking for the complete works of Marcel Proust. ‘I’m interested in something on dreams.’

  ‘Mmm,’ He rotated and glided across the floor, and made a wide, sweeping arc with his arm at a row of shelves, all labelled ‘Dreams’. He turned around. ‘Is it anything particular?’ He spoke in a studied, hushed public-library whisper, and his breath smelt of peppermints. He ran his finger along the spines as if he were caressing a sleeping girl’s back, then stopped and tapped one lightly. He pulled it out and held it in the air. ‘This is a possibility. Are you a student?’

  ‘No,’ said Sam, feeling flattered. No, but I’d like to be. I’d like to look like one, and be as carefree as one. And be as young as one. An Oxford man, are you? Me? I was educated at the University of Life. Know it? Turn first left down the Bitter Vale Of Tears. Graduated to Thompson’s. Never heard of it? J. Walter Thompson. Started as a secretary. Then became a production assistant. By the time I was twenty-six I had been made a junior producer (sounds the bizz, eh?). Then I gave it all up for a sprog. Oh, yes, working again now. Working and dreaming. Had a dream about an air disaster, actually – you probably read about it – that one in Bulgaria? I could have saved them all. Should have rung up the airline, shouldn’t I? EVERYBODY OFF, BOYS, THIS ONE’S A GONER!

  Would you have done?

  Shit. I’m going nuts. ‘No – I – I’m a layman. I’m just interested in – er – dream interpretation.’

  He replaced it with a slingshot flick of his wrist, and arched his back a fraction. ‘Ahh, hmm, let me see, I think, yes, this you’d probably get on with awfully well,’ he said, as if he’d known her all his life. He pulled out a slim paperback with a picture of an eyeball and a fish on the front cover. ‘Yes, this is the one. What Your Dreams Really Say.’

  Sam glanced at the back cover. ‘Dr Colin Hare, lecturer in Psychology at the University of Hull, has made Freud, Jung and other great interpreters of dreams accessible to the layman in this concise dictionary of dream symbolism.’

  ‘“It lives beside my bed . . . essential waking reading.”’ The Times.

  She flipped through the index, then turned to the page headed ‘Aeroplane’, and scanned through.

  ‘Flying: The longing to lift off, get out of a rut. Erection and sexual fantasies. Aeroplane = phallus. Can also = womb.’

  She looked through some more pages.

  ‘Swimming. Often means sex. The struggle with basic impulses or other problems. Can literally mean worry about keeping your head above water.’

  She turned again to the review quotes on the back cover, reading them for reassurance. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I’ll take it.’

  She left the shop, folded the paper bag around the book and put it into her handbag. She walked through the closed bric-a-brac stalls and crossed the street to the office, a narrow building sandwiched between a publisher and a shop that sold surgical appliances.

  The ground floor windows had black Venetian blinds, with the blow-up of a strip of celluloid running across, and the words ‘Ken Shepperd Productions’ repeated between the frames. She pushed open the heavy chromium-framed Deco door, and went into the stark airiness of the reception atrium.

  Sections of motor cars stuck out from the white walls, like strange modern sculptures. The front three feet of a red Alfa Romeo. The tail section of a Volkswagen Beetle. The seats in the waiting area were old leather car seats set into clear perspex pedestals, and the receptionist sat, looking slightly daft Sam always thought, behind the steering wheel of the sawn-off front end of a white convertible Cadillac Eldorado.

  ‘Morning, Lucy.’

  The receptionist stopped typing and looked up, a bleary-eyed conf
ection of mohair sweater, blotched makeup and streaked wild hair, which she tried to shake away from her face, without success. ‘Oh, yah, hi.’ She paused. ‘Yah, morning. Gosh.’ She smiled sleepily. ‘Someone called.’

  ‘Anyone in particular?’

  Sam watched Lucy scrabbling through a pile of message slips. She looked as though she’d had even less sleep than herself. ‘Ah, somewhere here – yah. Rob Kempson, from Praiseworthy – wants you to come in for a brief – either—’ She peered at the note. ‘Yah, Monday or Tuesday morning. Could you call him as soon as poss? Yah – gosh – no others so far.’

  Sam took the slip and blinked, her eyes feeling slightly gritty, stinging from the chlorine in the pool and from tiredness. She walked past the life-size waxwork of Ken slouched in a wicker chair behind Lucy, presiding over his emporium from behind the copy of the Daily Mail that was changed every day, and glanced down warily, as she always did, to check that he wasn’t playing a macabre joke by sitting there in person, as he had done once. The waxwork sculptor had captured the details well: the denim shirt and the curling hair, black turning to grey, and the slightly ragged, slightly dented I’m-going-to-one-day-change-the-world-before-it-changes-me-face. Everything except the eyes which stared blankly, lifelessly, unlike his real sharp blue eyes.

  Windows of the soul. Strange things, eyes.

  The waxy sheen of his skin wasn’t like him either. The waxy sheen that did not smell of tobacco and talc and hairs and clothes and booze; the sculpture smelt of nothing and was cold to touch, shiny and hard.

  This is what he would look like when he was dead.

  She climbed the elegant staircase, past more sections of cars: the rear of an old London taxi recessed into the wall, with the door removed so you could sit in it if you wanted, the slatted, cobalt blue bonnet of a Bugatti, held to the wall by leather straps.

  The building was on three storeys, with a basement. Ken’s office was at the top, in the eaves, and his snooker room was in the basement which was also their viewing room. Sam’s office was on the first floor, and there was a tiny office further along occupied by Drummond, their gofer.

  She walked down the landing and into the stark black and white of the office she shared with their PA, who was sitting at her desk in a thick sweet fug of cigarette smoke.

  ‘Morning, Claire.’

  Claire had a maddening habit of never saying ‘good morning’. Some days she did not even look up, and if Sam was in the office first, Claire would come in silently and sit down. Today she swept her short layered hair back from her round, pug-like face, and smiled. It was her favourite bad-news-coming smile. ‘Can you guess what?’

  Sam looked down at her and raised her eyebrows. She seemed to get a kick out of announcing problems.

  ‘Giraffes! He wants four giraffes!’

  The smoke was making Sam’s eyes even sorer, and her finger was hurting like hell. ‘Who wants four giraffes?’

  ‘Ken.’

  ‘Is he starting a zoo?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She shook her head. ‘I give up. I really give up. Where on earth can I get four giraffes from?’

  ‘Harrods,’ said Sam, taking advantage of the stunned silence her remark brought to get past Claire’s desk to her own safe haven by the window. And air, fresh air, however cold it might be. She pushed the window open and stared out.

  ‘Harrods?’ said Claire.

  ‘Yes. They sell everything.’ Sam watched a mummer dressed in black sitting on the kerb, drinking coffee from a thermos, then turned round and sat down at her desk. ‘Try some of the animal companies in the Knowledge,’ she said, picking up the phone and shuffling through her mail with her free hand.

  ‘There’s another problem. This one’s a real disaster. It’s the Polar night.’

  ‘Bears?’ said Sam, punching the dial buttons.

  ‘No! Darkness. The Polar night. Didn’t anyone realise?’

  ‘Realise what?’

  ‘The quote we’ve done for the fish fingers shoot – you know, JWT – the Superfingers – the trawler going past an iceberg? In the Arctic?’

  Sam nodded, listening to the voice at the other end of her phone. ‘Can I speak to Rob Kempson, please?’

  ‘It’s the Polar night, Darkness! No one’s thought of that.’

  ‘Could you tell him I returned his call, please. I’ll be here for another half-hour, then back this afternoon.’ She looked up at Claire. ‘Studio, Claire. It’ll be a studio shoot.’

  ‘It’s got to be location. The client specifically wants the Arctic.’ She lit a new cigarette and flapped the smoke away with her hand. ‘I don’t know. I give up. I really give up.’

  The door opened and Drummond shuffled in, tall, thin, hunched and dopey, like a sleepwalking anglepoise. ‘New showreel,’ he said, and sniffed, staring around the room as if he had just arrived in outer space. He held up a hard grey plastic box. ‘Where do you want it?’

  ‘It’s got the BMW in, hasn’t it, Drummond?’ Sam said.

  He nodded and sniffed again. ‘And the Bacardi.’

  ‘Leave it here, I want to see it. Ken and I both need to check it.’

  ‘Do you know anything about giraffes?’ asked Claire.

  ‘Giraffes?’

  ‘Yes, giraffes.’

  Drummond gazed at her blankly, a drip running from his coke-addled nose. ‘They don’t dream much.’

  ‘Dream?’ Claire said.

  ‘They only dream about half an hour a night. Shows they’re not very smart.’

  ‘Are you an expert on dreams, Drummond?’ said Sam.

  ‘Me?’ He looked around the room, as if to check that he was the Drummond she was addressing. ‘Weird things, dreams. Heavy duty. Inner Space.’ He frowned, put the U-matic cassette on Sam’s desk, then wandered out of the room.

  ‘Mrs Wolf said this was going to be a bad month,’ said Claire.

  ‘Wolf?’ said Sam dimly. ‘Wolves. Giraffes. There seem to be a lot of animals around this morning.’

  ‘My clairvoyant. Mrs Wolf.’ Claire picked up the phone and started dialling.

  Sam went out down the corridor to the coffee machine and poured herself a cup. She blew away the steam, took a couple of sips, then went back to her office and buzzed Ken on the intercom. ‘We ought to leave in five minutes. We’re due at the cutting room at 10.30.’

  ‘I thought we were screening here.’

  ‘Hawksmuir always wants to see the first cut on the cutting table. Do you want to walk or shall I call a taxi?’

  ‘We’ll leg it. Pick you up on the way down.’

  Sam looked at Claire. ‘Is she accurate, your clairvoyant?’

  ‘Yes, she’s very good. She told me Roger and I would split up.’

  ‘Does she ever give you good news?’

  ‘Sometimes.’ Claire smiled, and stared up at the ceiling, her eyes shrinking back into their fleshy sockets and glazing over, almost as if she was going into a trance. ‘Sometimes she gives me very good news.’

  They stood in the small windowless cutting room, surrounded by racks of film cans, loose strips of celluloid and sticky labels, millions of them, attached to everything in sight and written all over with marker pens, and stared down at the small screen of the Steenbeck editing table.

  Tony Riley, their editor, killed the overhead light, and the machine rolled with faint hum and a click of sprockets. The cream bonnet of a car appeared on the screen, long, stylish, vintage. A hand came into view and turned up the volume on the dashboard radio.

  I’m in paradise . . . I’m in paradise . . . I’m in paradise. Sam mentally sang the words of the song that hadn’t yet been recorded, the hard beat that would play over this. The camera pulled back to reveal a young, trendy man driving a large Fifties convertible Mercedes through the night. He was drumming the steering wheel with his hands in time to the beat of the music, and driving very slowly, no more than crawling speed. The camera showed a close-up of his face, slick, cocky, hedonistic, then cut to the view ahead. A
long, narrow street, full of elegant houses with open doorways down both sides.

  Leaning out of each doorway was a girl, dressed erotically. As he drove slowly though, eyeing them, they came forward, seductively brushing the car with their hands, their feet, with the fronds of a whip, raising their gowns a fraction, showing their stockings, their garters. He turned from side to side in his seat, humming the tune.

  I’m in paradise . . . I’m in paradise . . . I’m in paradise . . .

  There was a cut to a hospital bed, with a man lying in it, being wheeled along the street by two orderlies in white. The girls recoiled in horror as the bed passed through, and stood in frozen silence, watching as it was brought to a halt in front of the Mercedes. The camera zoomed in on a gaunt, desperately ill young man. He was just recognisable as the same man who had been driving the Mercedes.

  ‘Heaven or hell—’ The words ran through her head automatically. ‘Don’t leave the choice to someone else. Use a condom.’ The camera tracked past the bed and showed the Mercedes again, abandoned at the side of the road, burning fiercely. Ahead down the street, more cars were on fire and flames were leaping from the houses.

  The machine clicked off and the overhead light clicked on.

  Silence. Always a bloody silence.

  Director’s first cut.

  The script according to Ken Shepperd. International award-winning director. Twenty grand’s worth of fee.

  The silence got longer.

  We came in on budget, Sam thought. My contribution. Iron rod rule over Ken who would cheerfully have blown it, blown the profit.

  To get it even righter than right.

  Tom Hawksmuir, tall, sour copywriter, with a crop of blond hair twenty years too young for his booze-lined face, Euan Driver and Bentley Hewes. The agency Creative Team.

  Hawksmuir punted the first missile. ‘Looks like he’s driving the Merc out of a fucking showroom.’

  ‘The girl with the boa feather – didn’t you shoot a close-up, Ken, when she climbs on the bonnet and tries to straddle the star?’ said Bentley Hewes.

  ‘Wouldn’t get that through the IBA in a million years,’ Ken said.