Bad Dreams and Other Stories

by Tessa Hadley

  It was Hana again. — Is Julian still there? she asked urgently, secretively.

  — He is, I said.

  I took the phone and walked away with my back to him, into the next room.

  — Well, listen. I’ve been calling around a few friends. You should be careful. Apparently, he’s splitting up with Suzanne. So watch out for him. Julian’s a snake. He’ll take advantage of you because you’re vulnerable. I know he will. I should think he’s sniffing out somewhere to sleep for a few days.

  — I’m not vulnerable, I said. — Don’t worry about me.

  She was exasperated by my tone. — I’m pretty miffed, actually, by the idea of him making himself at home in my house while I’m away. You’d understand if you knew the half of what’s gone on.

  — I’m sorry. I thought he was a friend of yours. But don’t worry, anyway – we’ve almost finished supper.

  — And then he’s going?

  I said I could hardly push him out into the street the moment we’d cleared our plates. — I owe him a coffee, at least.

  — He doesn’t drink coffee, she said gloomily.

  She rang off, and I returned to the kitchen. Julian was standing with his back to the window, hands in his pockets, wearing the jacket he’d taken off to cook. I knew at once that something had changed during my absence.

  — Was that Hana looking after you? he said, amused.

  — I don’t need looking after.

  — Couldn’t you cheerfully strangle her sometimes?

  — You don’t have to hurry away, I said. — Won’t you stay for some tea? Is this because Hana called?

  Julian was suffused with regret, positively rosy with his own sheer decency in turning me down. — You’re feeling better now, aren’t you?

  — Don’t go, I cried.

  I seized him by the sleeves of his jacket, so that there could be no mistake about what I was offering; up close, I was submerged in his heat and the dense miasma of his smells, frying and sweat, intoxicating in the madness of the moment. Kindly, patiently, he disengaged himself. — It’s got nothing to do with Hana, he said. — I have to be somewhere else. Somebody will be wondering where I am. Don’t forget we’re going camping in the morning.

  I PRESSED THE front door shut behind him and then, for a long moment, while I rested my fingertips with finality on the cherry-red paint inside, I didn’t know whether I was going to die or not. I waited there, head bowed, for the wave to break over me – this was it, the whole humiliation. I was so exposed that I might as well have been skinned and turned inside out. Then my eyes fastened on two protruding screws, one on each side of the interior of Hana’s letter box: in their functional ugliness they were reassuring. I lifted my head and looked on tiptoe through the security peephole. Julian was gone; shooting the bolt across, I was alone. My thoughts wheeled around and down and then struck bottom: not, to my surprise, on despair but on something else after all – hard, bleak, grey, satisfactory freedom. Letting go of the strain of yearning was a relief, like stretched elastic retracting. When I walked into the kitchen, I saw that Julian had left a fifty-pound note tucked under the pepper pot. Working tenderly and cautiously around my self-esteem, as if it were convalescent, I cleared up – stacked most of the dishes and pans in the machine, rinsed a few delicate things, wiped down the surfaces and the cooker and the table, put the leftover food in the fridge.

  I thought I might watch a film – one of the art films that Hana had left downstairs for me. In the bedroom I changed back into my pyjamas and dressing gown, and on impulse hunted out my box of souvenirs – the perfume bottle, a few postcards, the pebbles. I had picked up these pebbles from a favourite beach I visited with my parents when I was a teenager: a fierce sea in a rocky cleft at the bottom of a steep descent through gorse bushes. One of them fitted snugly in my hand, and I hung on to it all the way through Pasolini’s Theorem, which I had seen before and which meant a lot to me. Washed smooth, the pebble was reddish brown, speckled with blue and cream like a bird’s egg, consoling.

  JULIAN MUST HAVE taken the attic key with him, because the next day I couldn’t find it anywhere. Hana was annoyed when she got back from LA and had to get a locksmith in to open the door; she didn’t mention finding Julian’s stuff stowed away in there, so I assumed he’d collected it sometime when I was out – he must have had a front-door key left over from the days of their affair. I had begun to be out most of the time, because the very next day after our supper I started looking for a job – and then I found one, working as a receptionist for a publisher of medical and scientific journals. Eventually I found a room too, in a shared house with some old friends. The funny thing was that after my evening with Julian I knew I came across as older and more experienced. People seemed to take me more seriously – as if I’d been initiated into something after all, although nothing had happened. I don’t think Hana ever believed that nothing had happened. She came to see me at my new place one evening, looking striking in a belted mac, with dark red lipstick and a beret pinned on her hair at a dramatic angle.

  — I need to know about Julian, she said.

  In good faith, I wanted to be guileless, transparent to her. I confessed about his storing the boxes and taking them away again – though I couldn’t bring myself to mention reading her diary.

  — And that’s all?

  I tried to clear my face, but something must have showed there which she couldn’t penetrate. She kept her eyes on me, and her watchfulness had respect and even fear in it, as if I were the one with secrets.

  Bad Dreams

  A child woke up in the dark. She seemed to swim up into consciousness as if to a surface which she then broke through, looking around with her eyes open. At first the darkness was implacable. She might have arrived anywhere: all that was certain was her own self, lying on her side, her salty smell and her warmth, her knees pulled up to her skinny chest inside the cocoon of her brushed-nylon nightdress. But as she stared into the darkness familiar forms began to loom through it: the pale outline of a window, printed by the street lamp against the curtains; the horizontals on the opposite wall, which were the shelves where she and her brother kept their books and toys. Beside the window she could make out a rectangle of wool cloth tacked up; her mother had appliquéd onto it a sleigh and two horses and a driver cracking his whip, first gluing on the pieces and then outlining them with machine stitching – star shapes in blue thread for the falling snowflakes, lines of red stitching for the reins and the twisting whip. The child knew all these details by heart, though she couldn’t see them in the dark. She was where she always was when she woke up: in her own bedroom, in the top bunk, her younger brother asleep in the lower one.

  Her mother and father were in bed and asleep, too. The basement flat was small enough that, if they were awake, she would have heard the sewing machine or the wireless, or her father practising the trumpet or playing jazz records. She struggled to sit up out of the tightly wound nest of sheets and blankets; she was asthmatic and feared not being able to catch her breath. Cold night air struck her shoulders. It was strange to stare into the room with wide-open eyes and feel the darkness yielding only the smallest bit, as if it were pressing back against her efforts to penetrate it. Something had happened, she was sure, while she was asleep. She didn’t know what it was at first, but the strong dread it had left behind didn’t subside with the confusion of waking. Then she remembered that this thing had happened inside her sleep, in her dream. She had dreamed something horrible, and so plausible that it was vividly present as soon as she remembered it.

  She had dreamed that she was reading her favourite book, the one she read over and over and actually had been reading earlier that night, until her mother came to turn off the light. In fact, she could feel the book’s hard corner pressing into her leg now through the blankets. In the dream, she had been turning its pages as usual when, beyond the story’s familiar last words, she discovered an extra section that she had never seen before, a short paragraph
set on a page by itself, headed ‘Epilogue’. She was an advanced reader for nine and knew about prologues and epilogues – though it didn’t occur to her then that she was the author of her own dreams and must have invented this epilogue herself. It seemed so completely a found thing, alien and unanticipated, coming from outside herself, against her will.

  In the real book she loved, Swallows and Amazons, six children spent their summers in perfect freedom, sailing dinghies on a lake, absorbed in adventures and rivalries that were half invented games and half truth, pushing across the threshold of safety into a thrilling unknown. All the details in the book had the solidity of life, though it wasn’t her own life – she didn’t have servants or boats or a lake or an absent father in the navy. She had read all the other books in the series, too, and she acted out their stories with her friends at school, although they lived in a city and none of them had ever been sailing. The world of Swallows and Amazons existed in a dimension parallel to their own, touching it only in their games. They had a Swallows and Amazons club, and took turns bringing in ‘grub’ to eat, ‘grog’ and ‘pemmican’; they sewed badges, and wrote notes in secret code. All of them wanted to be Nancy Blackett, the strutting pirate girl, though they would settle for Titty Walker, sensitive and watchful.

  Now the child seemed to see the impersonal print of the dream epilogue, written on the darkness in front of her eyes. John and Roger both went on to, it began, in a businesslike voice. Of course, the words weren’t actually in front of her eyes, and parts of what was written were elusive when she sought them; certain sentences, though, were scored into her awareness as sharply as if she’d heard them read aloud. Roger drowned at sea in his twenties. Roger was the youngest of them all, the ship’s boy, in whom she had only ever been mildly interested: this threw him into a terrible new prominence. John suffered with a bad heart. The Blackett sisters . . . long illnesses. Titty, killed in an unfortunate accident. The litany of deaths tore jaggedly into the tissue that the book had woven, making everything lopsided and hideous. The epilogue’s gloating bland language, complacently regretful, seemed to relish catching her out in her dismay. Oh, didn’t you know? Susan lived to a ripe old age. Susan was the dullest of the Swallows, tame and sensible, in charge of cooking and housekeeping. Still, the idea of her ‘ripe old age’ was full of horror: wasn’t she just a girl, with everything ahead of her?

  The child knew that the epilogue existed only in her dream, but she couldn’t dispel the taint of it, clinging to her thoughts. When she was younger she had called to her mother if she woke in the night, but something stopped her from calling out now: she didn’t want to tell anyone about this. Once the words were said aloud, she would never be rid of them; it was better to keep them hidden. And she was afraid, anyway, that her mother wouldn’t understand the awfulness of the dream if she tried to explain it: she might laugh or think it was silly. For the first time, the child felt as if she were alone in her own home – its rooms spread out about her, invisible in the night, seemed unlike their usual selves. The book touching her leg through the blankets frightened her, and she thought she might never be able to open it again. Not wanting to lie down in the place where she’d had the dream, she swung over the side rail of the bed and reached with her bare feet for the steps of the ladder – the lower bunk was a cave so dark that she couldn’t make out the shape of her sleeping brother. Then she felt the carpet’s gritty wool under her toes.

  The children’s bedroom, the bathroom, papered in big blue roses, and their parents’ room were all at the front of the massive Victorian house, which was four storeys tall, including this basement flat; sometimes the child was aware of the other flats above theirs, full of the furniture of other lives, pressing down on their heads. Quietly she opened her bedroom door. The doors to the kitchen and the lounge, which were at the back of the flat, stood open onto the windowless hallway; a thin blue light, falling through them, lay in rectangles on the hall carpet. She had read about moonlight, but had never taken in its reality before: it made the lampshade of Spanish wrought iron, which had always hung from a chain in the hallway, seem suddenly as barbaric as a cage or a portcullis in a castle.

  Everything was tidy in the kitchen: the dishcloth had been wrung out and hung on the edge of the plastic washing-up bowl; something on a plate was wrapped in greaseproof paper; the sewing machine was put away under its cover at one end of the table. The pieces of Liberty lawn print, which her mother was cutting out for one of her ladies, were folded carefully in their paper bag to keep them clean. Liberty lawn: her mother named it reverently, like an incantation – though the daily business of her sewing wasn’t reverent but briskly pragmatic, cutting and pinning and snipping at seams with pinking shears, running the machine with her head bent close to the work in bursts of concentration, one hand always raised to the wheel to slow it, or breaking threads quickly in the little clip behind the needle. The chatter of the sewing machine, racing and easing and halting and starting up again, was like a busy engine driving their days. There were always threads and pins scattered on the floor around where her mother was working – you had to be careful where you stepped.

  In the lounge, the child paddled her toes in the hair of the white goatskin rug. Gleaming, uncanny, half reverted to its animal past, the rug yearned to the moon, which was balanced on top of the wall at the back of the paved yard. The silver frame of her parents’ wedding photograph and the yellow brass of her father’s trumpet – in its case with the lid open, beside the music stand – shone with the same pale light. Lifting the heavy lid of the gramophone, she breathed in the forbidden smell of the records nestled in their felt-lined compartments, then touched the pages heaped on her father’s desk: his meaning, densely tangled in his black italic writing, seemed more accessible through her fingertips in the dark than it ever was in daylight, when its difficulty thwarted her. He was studying for his degree in the evenings, after teaching at school all day. She and her brother played quietly so as not to disturb him; their mother had impressed upon them the importance of his work. He was writing about a book, Leviathan: his ink bottle had left imprints on the desk’s leather inlay, and he stored his notes on a shelf in cardboard folders, carefully labelled – the pile of folders growing ever higher. The child was struck by the melancholy of this accumulation: sometimes she felt a pang of fear for her father, as if he were exposed and vulnerable – and yet when he wasn’t working he charmed her with his jokes, pretending to be poisoned when he tasted the cakes she had made, teasing her school friends until they blushed. She never feared in the same way for her mother: her mother was capable; she was the whole world.

  In their absence, her parents were more distinctly present to her than usual, as individuals with their own unfathomable adult preoccupations. She was aware of their lives running backwards from this moment, into a past that she could never enter. This moment, too, the one fitted around her now as inevitably and closely as a skin, would one day become the past: its details then would seem remarkable and poignant, and she would never be able to return inside them. The chairs in the lounge, formidable in the dimness, seemed drawn up as if for a spectacle, waiting more attentively than if they were filled with people: the angular recliner built of black tubular steel, with lozenges of polished wood for arms; the cone-shaped wicker basket in its round wrought-iron frame; the black-painted wooden armchair with orange cushions; and the low divan covered in striped olive-green cotton. The reality of the things in the room seemed more substantial to the child than she was herself – and she wanted in a sudden passion to break something, to disrupt this world of her home, sealed in its mysterious stillness, where her bare feet made no sound on the lino or the carpets.

  On impulse, using all her strength, she pushed at the recliner from behind, tipping it over slowly until it was upside down, with its top resting on the carpet and its legs in the air, the rubber ferrules on its feet unexpectedly silly in the moonlight, like prim, tiny shoes. Then she tipped over the painted chair, so that
its cushions flopped out. She pulled the wicker cone out of its frame and turned the frame over, flipped up the goatskin rug. She managed to make very little noise, just a few soft bumps and thuds; when she had finished, though, the room looked as if a hurricane had blown through it, throwing the chairs about. She was shocked by what she’d effected, but gratified, too: the after-sensation of strenuous work tingled in her legs and arms, and she was breathing fast; her whole body rejoiced in the chaos. Perhaps it would be funny when her parents saw it in the morning. At any rate, nothing – nothing – would ever make her tell them that she’d done it. They would never know, and that was funny, too. A private hilarity bubbled up in her, though she wouldn’t give way to it; she didn’t want to make a sound. And at that very moment, as she surveyed her crazy handiwork, the moon sank below the top of the wall outside and the room darkened, all its solidity withdrawn.

  THE CHILD’S MOTHER woke up early, in the dawn. Had her little boy called out to her? Sometimes in the night he had strange fits of crying, during which he didn’t recognise her and screamed in her arms for his mummy. She listened, but heard nothing – yet she was as fully, promptly awake as if there had been some summons or a bell had rung. Carefully she sat up, not wanting to wake her sleeping husband, who was lying on his side, with his knees drawn up and his back to her, the bristle of his crew cut the only part of him visible above the blankets. The room was just as she had left it when she went to sleep, except that his clothes were thrown on top of hers on the chair; he had stayed up late, working on his essay. She remembered dimly that when he got into bed she had turned over, snuggling up to him, and that in her dream she had seemed to fit against the shape of him as sweetly as a nut into its shell, losing herself inside him. But now he was lost, somewhere she couldn’t follow him. Sometimes in the mornings, especially if they hadn’t made love the night before, she would wake to find herself beside this stranger, buried away from her miles deep, frowning in his sleep. His immobility then seemed a kind of comment, or a punishment, directed at her.