by Pera Barrett

Copyright information
First published by Pera Barrett in 2017
Copyright © Pera Barrett, 2017
[email protected]
ISBN 978-0-473-41100-8
Printed by Your Books, Wellington, New Zealand
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.
www.perabarrett.com
For Huhana. For Jellybean.
For Kyana, Takutai, and Tui.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Danielle, co-parent and wife extraordinaire, for reminding me every day what's most important, and then being that too. Huhana and a person currently called Jellybean, for inspiring me every day to write.
Mum, for using those harakeke hardened fingers to point out where imagination lives. Dad, for putting the broom in my hands and showing me how to work.
Nana Joan and Grandad for being the kind of grandparents every boy and girl needs.
To the IWW crew, Matt and Matthew, Sam, Kate, Jayne, Christina, Lynette, and Mum for your time and patience beta reading, editing, and pointing out that I still don’t know the basics of grammar. Chrissy and Lee, for bringing the idea to life with your pencils and paintbrush. Skills!
To all these amazing people who supported the Kickstarter project to bring this book to life:
Helen C, Leigh & Kanikani Kids, Kelly and family, Markham & Teresa, Liam & Aimee, Joanna, Maddy, Tom, Riley Leger, Zahira Masters and Daniel O’Conner, Sue Jeurissen, Talima Fiso, Tricia, Warwick Kendrick, Matt Adam, Lancaster Family, Rachel Dawson, Robyn Cook, June, Nadia Bentley, Sue & Dude Peake, Jake Cooksley, Steph Parker, Sarah Rudd, Ethan Webb, Madden Adelaide Poananga, Kerry Matheson, Marie O’Brien, the Hodges Family, Georgina Pahl, Ryan Young, Jardena Shelton, Emma Winstanley, Sarah Neal, Shonali, David 'Esoligh' Patterson, Gemma Devenport, Sophie Pritchard, PJ (always dream big), Brielle Wood, Miesha and Jordan Taylor, Kiri Parata, Ravneel Chand, Katherine McMenamin, Tiara Waretini, Lisa Webster, Olivia Groube, Martine Hartley-Parsons, Lorraine Driskel, Christie, Charlotte Haines, Louise, Wes, Renée Goodlet, Andrew Norman, Makaio Daud, Kevin Rice, Emma Hollows, Tracey Hollands, Hannah Brown, Nicholas Brown, Hinengakau Te Wai Takarangi Firmin, H. Goile-McEvoy, Makelita Cotter, Rob & Kat Cook, Poppa Joe, Te Rere, Riana Ellie Moffatt, Ngahuia, Eileen Hollands, Alana, King Tony & Rere, the Whitelaw family, Hayley Kyle, Tyler & Rennie Atfield-Douglas, Zac Kenneally, The Can-i Oggy family, Austin Harold, Trudi Harding, Aria Tawhara-Saunders, Kelsey Devlin, Mahina Chadwick, Alexandra & Joshua Allport, Tana, Renee Strawbridge, Wayne and Adrienne Spratt, Renaye Gillespie, Jennifer L McGavin, Carole Williams, Julie Knight, Shaun Vermeulen, Ally & Em, Kristen & Steve Meads, Kate Nitschke, Ingrid & Matt, Nathan, Christy Law, Maapihi and Hunter Pritchard, Nic, Whitney-Marie Te Tomo, Lily Hereora, Madeline West, Gina Barlow, Dave Forest, Judy Broughton, Sheena, Mardi, Esme Alo-Tafau & Waiora Alo-Reeder, James Nicolle, Johnstone Family, Pikitia, Charissa Claire, Chris, Khatalaya.
Thank you!
1 THE OLD MAN
Most people don't know he exists.
Few who have seen him remember.
I know what he looks like, and I’m not meant to tell.
I'll whisper it to you though, if you promise not to yell.
————
He’s an old man, but not so old that you would offer an arm if you know what I mean. His face is long, not tired, and not unhappy. He just looks like he's been doing the same thing since Adam met Eve.
He doesn't have a name, or at least not one he remembers. Most people have never heard of him. Most think the dreams they dream when the world shutters its lamp are their own. They don’t know he writes them all. But I do. And now you do too.
He sits at a desk a few shades darker than his dusty, pine green trousers, and writes in the bright leather dream books that his assistants pass him from the shelves. He grips the same pen he's always gripped, rifled silver with a clip that never gets used because he never lets it go.
His assistants are a strange lot — each one a tangle of roughly drawn lines that don’t make physical sense. A triangle head sits on a mess of scribbles that run down their middle. Long spindly arms and short legs poke out at awkward angles connecting triangular hands and feet. Woven between their fingers is a web of nettle threads and green-spider silk. Their webbed palms open like Polynesian outrigger sails, they catch dreams like the sails catch wind.
The few times The Old Man has tried to describe his assistants in a dream, their heads start to shake and they make frantic chattering noises. Their arm and leg lines wobble and blur like guitar strings plucked and left. But even then, they still do their job. They pick up the books, put them into the cart, into The Device, and wait. They stand like distracted things found on the bent corner of a boring school book, things that should never be lifted up and out into the brick and wood frame of the world. They don’t belong there. But when the Old Man sends them, they go.
The Device gets the dreams down to the sleepers. It sits in the middle of the room next to The Old Man's, its whirring and clunking so constant he barely hears it over the scratching of his pen tip across the pages of his dream books. There was a time The Old Man knew its every pipe and dial, but he doesn’t have time to think about such details now, his assistants take care of that.
He can see The Device when his assistants open the door to push the rickety old cart filled with books from his room into the next. Sometimes he watches as one of them climbs the wooden stepladder and pushes a dream into the slot like the postman delivering mail. Sometimes he watches the contraption shake in panic, not enough for the rivets around its pipes to pop, but enough to make you scared they might. Most of the time, however, he is in the middle of writing something fantastic and doesn't stop. Who has time for watching what others are doing when there’s doing of your own to be done?
————
Here, shuffle over and let me tell you about how I met him. It’s not a long story, and we’ve both got a bit of time on our hands.
2 HOW MANY HAVE YOU GROWN?
Of dark things and dreamers,
And drops in the swell,
Black wings and the little white lies that they sell.
————
The Old Man arrived in my room late one night last winter. Didn't knock; didn't clear his throat; just appeared with his brown leather briefcase and its big brass clasp. He smelled of dust and old things. He looked like my grandfather reporting for his job at the City Council.
He set the briefcase down on my dresser, the leather slapped on the dresser’s polished top, and a cloud of dust shot into the air, drifted back down, and slid off the hardwood surface I had wiped clean earlier that day. He flicked the clasp of the case open and thrust his hand inside. He rummaged around and pulled out a chipped wood clipboard. He patted his pockets, sighed, and then stuck his hand back into the case. Two grunts later, he pulled out a silver pen, clicked the end, then reached up with his other hand and smoothed his white hair over from its impeccable part.
He turned to me, his wire rimmed spectacles zeroing in on my face. “How many done-things have you grown in the last thirty days?” His words were clipped and quick, the shortness giving his voice an edge of panic, mismatched with his blue, calm, accountant-style shirt.
I extended my arm and shook his hand because he had that kind of look abou
t him. Like shaking his hand was the right thing to do. “I'm not sure who you are or what you mean.”
“Yes, yes, greetings Matthew. Who I am is not important. Now, how many have you grown?” He tapped his pen against the clipboard, in time with his foot which he tapped on the floor.
I straightened. How did he know my name?
“Dreams, dreams.” His eyes darted around the room. “How many dreams have you grown into done-things? I don't have long.”
But he did have long; he had a long black coffee, and I had a white tea.
We moved to the kitchen. The smell of fish and chips and salt hung thick in the air from my dinner. I swept the cold crumbs, Tomato Sauce, and white bread off the bench — ‘even if you’re worse for wear, a guest deserves your best’ my mother used to say. I pulled a chair out for The Old Man.
“Every dream I send has a place in the world,” he said as he sat.
“Sounds like a song.” I hadn’t meant to say that aloud.
“Yes. Well. When it's finished being a dream, and the dreamer grows it into a done-thing, it slots into its place out there.” The Old Man waved his arm out in an arc. “Or at least it should. The nightmares are how I knew something was wrong. How I knew I had to talk to you.” His hand around the coffee cup shook in excitement. “Nightmares have always happened, of course, they find their way in when a dream hasn't grown into a done-thing. Nobody knows where they come from, and they used to number so few that nobody cared. But it's different now. There are so many of them, oh so many. I had hoped. I had thought... the thought came before the hope obviously, given the nature of the mind... I had thought I might be wrong. But I see now I wasn't. What will we do, what will we do?”
“What does it mean?” I said.
He stirred his coffee and looked into the cup. Three circles clockwise, three circles counterclockwise, and back again.
Clink, clink, clink.
Clink, clink, clink.
“I said, what does it mean, Sir? I think I’ve been especially polite and good mannered about all of this, but it’s late, I’m tired, and I really don’t understand what’s going on.” I regretted my tone. I had taken a sleeping pill thirty minutes earlier, but the tea seemed to be fighting it now, and my calmness was starting to slip. “Sorry, sir I’m —”
“There are pieces of the world missing,” The Old Man said, “too many pieces. We expect a certain number of dreams to fall out, of course, that is unavoidable and most natural. But this many? No, it is entirely unnatural! The world does not build itself, it needs your dreams to be grown into done-things. Without them, there would be no planes, cars, phones or even that little glass bulb that lets you turn night into day.” He pointed at the nightlight in its freshly dusted white shade. “They are required. And it is not simply the fact that the world cannot be built, as if that were not bad enough. No, there are also now too many undone-dreams. These all fall somewhere, and I suspect that’s where the nightmares are climbing and crawling up into the sleep space.”
I imagined the nightmares as things with long spindly legs, crawling up the side of the bunk bed I slept in as a kid, and shivered.
“My assistants talk of days when the nightmares outnumbered the dreams, what a terrible time. What a terrible thing to imagine. They pull the world apart you realise? They take those beautiful done-things of good, and pull them out of place with their long awful claws and their wicked black wings.”
I shivered again.
The Old Man sucked in a breath between his teeth. “Do you know of the last undoing?” He bowed his head slightly and peered at me over his spectacles the way a parent does when talking to a child. Only, I was the same height as him, so it looked a little strange.
I shook my head.
“The last undoing was a most, most, troubling time,” The Old Man said. “People stopped doing the things they’re meant to do. So the world stopped growing.”
Even though I still wasn’t sure who he was, where he came from, or if this was all, in fact, a bizarre dream that could be explained away by the cheese on toast I had before bed — for some reason I felt that I had let him down, and even stranger, that made me sad.
“You believed you knew everything that was true,” The Old Man said, “and that everything you knew, was in fact true. So, so sad. You stopped growing dreams into done-things to such an extent that the nightmares took over and darkened your minds.”
I nodded and continued weighing up the chances of this being a ludicrous dream.
“You fought with axes, spears, and knives because that’s what you believed you should be doing. Because that’s what your kings and queens told you. You listened when they said the nightmares were real, and that fighting the other side was the only way to stop them. You believed the songs that sung of slights. You swung swords in retribution, for attacks you’d never suffered, from armies you’d never met.” His shoulders dropped and his face softened. “Oh, how you fought, and oh, how the world suffered. It was a terrible time to be alive and an even more terrible time to be watching. You brought yourself back on track eventually, well, with a little help from some inspired dreamers. You really do have more to thank Leonardo and Michelangelo for than you realise.”
“The artists?”
“Yes, Matthew, the artists. So that is the scale of the problem we face. That is what we must stop.” He tilted his head to the side as if listening to something I couldn’t quite hear.
3 BRIGITTA SPINKS
“Did you know Valerie Willis went to school down the road? She grew up just like we did. Look at her now. There’s a poster of her in the canteen saying she hated the training but loved to win, and you can’t have one without the other. I’m gonna train like her. Already set my alarm for an hour earlier, you should too.”
- Ariana Cleveland, 12 years old.
————
While The Old Man made himself at home in a Millington suburb not far from the city, Brigitta Spinks rode a passenger train into the central business district. The swings and slides of Grasslands Park rushed by the train’s double glazed windows in a blur.
Brigitta shook the train attendant’s hand. “Why hello there, I’m Brigitta Spinks. So very pleased to meet you. Such great, consistent work you are doing here, it really is a breath of fresh air to see someone following such a beautifully reliable pattern.”
The train attendant regarded Brigitta with an expressionless set of eyes and continued swaying down the aisle, clipping tickets to a metronome-like rhythm over the engine’s thrum.
Click, click, click.
Click, click, click.
Imagine an ex-army officer, turned advertising agent, turned politician. That was Brigitta. You could see the hardness beneath the soft red lipstick. Her eyes sparkled, but not in a friendly way. Her pale cheeks flushed red, but with makeup, not warmth; she was more predatory than amused; less spritely than calculating.
She wore a pistol-grey suit with sharp, bright angles. The suit’s edges seemed to cut the air in front of her, making way for its master. Her shoes were black, functional, and fitting.
When she walked, a gold bracelet on her left wrist clinked against its matching silver mate to remind her of its worth.
According to her company profile in the glossy welcome pamphlet, ‘Brigitta catches the train because she respects its efficiency and the robustness of its schedule. Never late, always doing what it’s meant to be doing. As reliable as the world used to be’.
Brigitta was sitting on the train, being interviewed for an article in the city paper. It was a piece on the current state of jobs in the city, and a response to the controversial comments made at a press event by one of her team that ‘dreams are for losers, and real men move Cogs’. Brigitta couldn’t agree more.
She was midway through her response. “My Dear, it has never been proven that dreams are good for you in any regard. Or that they have contributed anything to society. Show me the research. Do you know what has contributed? Industry. Hard work
. Cogs that turn the way they should. I know that's not sexy; work ethic doesn’t wear curls, but it makes the world move, Darling.”
She paused for effect as her mouth and eyes finished the sentence with a convincingly sincere smile.
“But don’t mistake me, nobody in my company is saying children shouldn’t dream. Far from it. We are one hundred percent supportive of under-fives dreaming. Studies have shown that children younger than five are very inefficient workers,” she said into the grey and black audio device held by a young journalist.
Hunched forward with the device pointed at Brigitta’s perfect smile, the journalist nodded and asked another question.
“Oh, I’m not just running for the presidency, my Dear. I’m trying to save the world.”
Ten minutes later the interview was over and the train had stopped. Brigitta shook the reporter’s hand and stepped through the automatic doors. She looked up at the sign above her like she did every morning and inhaled deeply. The sign read ‘Millington City Central Station’, and the air smelled of brake pads and oil. The smell of industry. The smell of achievement, she thought with a grin.
It was a short walk to Brigitta’s office from the train station and its towering pillars.
Each morning she allowed herself one indulgent look back down the emotionless row of concrete giants holding the station’s roof steady. It was the same view every time, but it still made her smile; iron tracks that shot like a conquering soldier’s bullets from platform to the horizon. Those perfectly parallel lines that cut across the world’s rivers, hills and oceans, all met here. Such an astounding feat of industry and applied science. That is what our minds and hands are for, she thought. That is what will make this world great again.