Bad Dreams and Other Stories

by Tessa Hadley

  Their conversation was relaxed – maybe the television helped, because it was always on. They had playback, so they could be tuned in all the time to their favourite smart comedies, American and British; perhaps partly because of these programmes, their own humour seemed quick and sophisticated to Claire – she was impressed. If the baby fussed he was passed around between them and they all took their turn at soothing him, walking up and down with him and jigging him; Ben changed his nappy and everyone watched around the changing mat as if Calum were a little prince at court. The sight of his weak flailing baby limbs and the reddened swollen navel tugged painfully at Claire – he startled fearfully once, jerking his whole body with a grimace and lost cry as if he were falling through empty space. From time to time they took up mugs of tea for Susan which she didn’t drink, or tried to talk to her through the closed door. When they marvelled at how Susan was managing without visiting the bathroom, Amy remembered she kept Nanny’s old pot under the bed, in case she was caught short in the night: the boys protested that was more information than they needed.

  Amy found sheets for Claire to put on the pull-out sofa in the front room – Ryan offered her his bedroom but she said she’d rather be downstairs. The small front room was crowded with odds and ends of furniture, broken hi-fi, boxes of china wrapped in newspaper; there were even a couple of bikes propped against one wall. The footsteps of passers-by sounded intimately close outside the window. The same old sunburst clock – against the Anaglypta wallpaper, above the gas fire with its teak surround – was stopped perpetually at ten past four. Claire made up the sofa bed and put out her clothes for the morning on a hanger. Then when the others had all finished in the bathroom, she felt herself in possession of the house at last, prowling round the ground floor in her stockinged feet, washing the dishes in the kitchen, tidying up quietly. The noise of television or the Internet seeped from the rooms upstairs, the baby bleated once or twice and then was stilled.

  When she went out to listen in the hall, Claire noticed for the first time a red bag on the floor, made of thick imitation leather with strong handles, crammed untidily full; this had to be Susan’s work bag, she must have put it down when she came in. Soundlessly she picked it up and took it into the front room, shutting the door behind her. Then she lifted things out of the bag one after another onto her bed, scrupulous to preserve their exact order – folders and a phone and an umbrella and a street map; car keys and a purse and woollen gloves and a hairbrush full of dead hair; a Tupperware box with half a sandwich and a KitKat uneaten inside it. She laid the silk scarf that she’d bought for her sister, still wrapped in its tissue paper, in the very bottom of the bag, hidden under a few scuffed old leaflets and a plastic rain hat. Very carefully then, so no one could tell that anything had been disturbed, she replaced everything else on top of it, and returned the bag to its place under the coats. It might be months even, she thought, before Susan found her present. But when she did, she’d know who put it there.

  She picked up a newspaper from the magazine rack; it was days old, folded open to where a cryptic crossword was half finished in Susan’s handwriting. Claire wanted to complete it; she hunted for a biro and made herself more tea and a hot-water bottle and got into her bed, frowning over the clues one after another. Their mother had been good at crosswords, squinting at them through the smoke from her Embassy Regal; Susan had learned from her how to write out her anagrams like this in circles, breaking up the pattern of the original words and allowing new ones to emerge. Filling in with satisfaction the letters that fitted around Susan’s letters, Claire felt herself closely in contact with her sister and expected to hear her coming down at any moment. No matter how quietly she moved, the creaking stairs would give her away. As soon as she heard Susan, Claire thought, she would get out of bed just as she was in her nightdress and follow her into the back room and speak to her, and they would surely be able to find their way through all this rubble of the past piled up between them. But she couldn’t finish the crossword, and fell asleep over it eventually.

  IN THE MORNING she woke very early. When she got up from her sofa bed to use the bathroom before the others needed it, she saw that the red bag and Susan’s coat were gone from the hall; she must have left for work already, although it was still dark, not six o’clock. Perhaps Claire had been aware in her sleep of the front door quietly opening and closing, Susan’s car starting up outside. It would be for the best if she left too, she calculated, before the sleepy household creaked into action. She was keen now to return to her own world. The baby began to squeak upstairs and she heard Amy grumbling, picking him up out of his crib. Quickly Claire washed at the sink in the bathroom, then dressed and tidied the sofa bed away, folding up the sheets and the duvet, bundling yesterday’s clothes into her shoulder bag. The idea of another day spent attending to the baby in that stuffy room made her feel panic. She wrote a note for Amy in the kitchen.

  When she closed the front door behind her and stepped out into the grey light in the empty street, filling her lungs with foggy air, she felt the same exulting relief she always had, since she first left when she was seventeen. A bus ran from a stop just round the corner, which would take her to the station. She’d reserved a room in the same hotel near Liverpool Street; that night she was going out for a meal with London friends. Her flight the next day didn’t leave until the early afternoon. In Philadelphia she’d have to face the work colleague she’d slept with before she came away – but she could cope with that, and get over it. He was married with children, so he was unlikely to have told anyone. She was ashamed to remember how she’d begun that evening by flirting with this man and teasing him, believing herself in charge of what could happen; now certain bloody, humiliating truths seemed indelible between them. But you could shed your skin over and over, Claire thought, and believe each time that you’d come to the end of shame, and it wasn’t true. You could always be born again, with a new skin. She hadn’t come to the end of her chances, not yet.

  When she arrived at the hotel in London they didn’t have her room ready, so she left her suitcase at reception and sat in the lounge with a coffee and a mineral water, putting some of the notes she’d made in Chingford into the form of a report which would be useful for her boss, tapping away on her laptop, checking emails. A suspicion darted suddenly through her preoccupation. She unzipped the shoulder bag on the seat beside her, riffling among the dirty clothes and nightdress and wash things. When she found what she was hunting for – there at the bottom of the bag was the silk scarf, untouched in its tissue paper – she actually laughed out loud. Incredible! How had Susan guessed that the scarf was hidden in her own bag? Of course if anyone could outwit her it was her sister. But how ever had she managed to creep into the front room while Claire slept, and hide it again among her things without waking her?

  For a moment Claire only wanted to get rid of the little package. She could leave it behind her here in the lounge when she went upstairs, or drop it into the waste bin in her room, a surprise for the cleaner. Then she changed her mind. After all, she could keep the scarf for herself. Why not? Tearing off the tissue paper, she lifted it out of its folds. The heavy, slippery silk flooded into her lap, lithe and vivid as an animal; it was nicer even than she’d remembered, the tan and green colours making her think of woodland and fresh leaves. When she put it around her neck its touch was subtle, cool. She felt a moment’s stabbing sorrow for everything she’d lost and left behind. But she knew from past experience how to push that sorrow down and bury it.

  Under the Sign of the Moon

  The train paused at a red light on its way into the station, waiting for a platform to clear. The passengers had put on their coats and put away their laptops and lifted their bags down from the luggage rack; some were already standing, queuing between the seats. Liverpool was the last station, the end of the two-and-a-half-hour journey from London; they were ready to move on but could not move anywhere yet. Quiet and stillness settled unexpectedly on the ca
rriage. Because the forward motion of their lives was suspended while they waited, the passengers were suddenly more intimately present to one another – although no one spoke or made eye contact. Greta felt the change in atmosphere and looked up from her book and out of the window, keeping her finger on her page. They were waiting in shadow, in a cutting between high walls of red sandstone.

  In the rock she could see, like art patterns following the natural lines of the strata, the chisel marks of the navvies who’d once cut and blasted down into it. The rock face was streaked with moss, and here and there buddleia and fern had rooted, scrawny because they lived out their lives in this subterranean railway kingdom; far above, ash saplings stood out against a pale sky. The strata in the rock were woven into sections of brick wall and the old bricks – small and vivid, rust-coloured, crusted with salts – seemed to flow as if they, too, had been put down in sedimentary layers. Elegantly arched recesses were built into the base of the wall. The old engineering was as magnificent in its scale and ambition as a Roman ruin, Greta thought, its ancientness inscrutable and daunting and moving.

  The man sitting across the table from her noticed that she was looking out. He told her that this was the oldest stretch of railway in the world, and that they used to have to haul the trains into Lime Street from here, because it was too steep for the early locomotives. — There are stables built into the rock for all the horses, he said. — We’re inside a hill they call Mount Olive.

  Greta didn’t know whether she believed him: whether he was the sort of man who knew about things or the sort who made them up. She made an interested noise, then looked back down at her book without speaking. Since her illness began, at least in the intervals when she felt well enough to read, she had immersed herself in books almost fanatically, trying not to leave open any chink in her consciousness through which she could be waylaid by awareness of her body or by fear or disgust. She read only fiction, not history or politics, and nothing experimental or difficult that would require her to pause for reflection or argument. She had read a lot of novels recently that she would have disdained in the past.

  AS SOON AS she had settled into her seat at Euston, the man across the table had shown signs of wanting to talk. He had asked her how far she was going, and then whether she was travelling for business or on a holiday. Greta had answered, friendly enough, that she was going to see her daughter, Kate, who had moved to Liverpool recently. It hadn’t occurred to her at first that he might want their conversation to continue past these preliminaries. The gap between them had seemed too immense; she was almost sixty, and he was surely nearer to her daughter’s age. His rather distinctive hair was short and thick: dark blond, wavy and wiry, with burnished gold threads in it. When he found out that Kate lived in Aigburth, he told her that he was born there, and seemed disproportionately astonished and delighted by the coincidence. Greta couldn’t hear any traces of a Liverpool accent, but he might have shed it or never had it.

  There was something in his eagerness to please that warned her off. His good looks reminded her of certain damaged film stars and pop stars from her childhood in the early sixties: cheekbones and jaw chiselled too rigidly, mouth loose-lipped and needy, handsome head oversized in relation to the slack, slight body. He was neatly dressed: none of Kate’s male friends would ever have chosen to wear a belted short white mac, an open-necked yellow shirt and a maroon V-necked jumper. If Greta hadn’t heard the man speak she might have thought he was a foreigner, a Central European, dressing according to a different code. He took the mac off at some point and folded it, laying it carefully on the seat beside him, on top of a leather box-briefcase with a combination lock. You didn’t see those briefcases so often now, she realised, because everybody carried a laptop. The briefcase was old-fashioned, like his clothes.

  He kept telling her how much she was going to like Liverpool. It had a reputation, he said, but actually it had changed completely since the bad old days. Liverpudlians were the most warm-hearted people you’d ever meet; they’d give you their last crust if you needed it. Greta thought she could hear the accent then, slipping into his speech – almost as if he were putting it on for her benefit. The only thing she didn’t like about Liverpool, she thought, was the way people who came from there harped on about how warm-hearted they were. She didn’t bother to tell him that she had visited Kate once already, a year ago, just after her diagnosis. And she had lived in Liverpool for a while, too, in the seventies, with Kate’s father – who was not the man she was married to now. So she knew something about how much the city had changed.

  Determinedly, she opened up her book.

  — I can see you’re a great reader, he said.

  — Yes.

  — I wish I had more time for it. I used to love stories when I was a kid. Mum said the world could end while I was reading and I wouldn’t even notice.

  Smiling non-committally, she pretended to be wrapped up at once in her novel – though for a few moments the words she stared at swam in her mind, not conveying any meaning. She was too aware of her companion’s presence across the table, and of having so firmly cut off his desire to talk. He seemed at a loss as to what to do without her. He didn’t even have a newspaper with him. But Greta had to save herself, and didn’t care if he thought she was rude or cold.

  He didn’t show any sign of being offended. He spoke to her again from time to time – usually when, having forgotten about him, she looked up inadvertently from her reading. — How’s it going? he asked jocularly once, nodding at her book as if it were a marathon test she’d set herself. The train stopped at Stafford, and he seemed to know all about that, too – he told her about a castle, and a battle in the Civil War. Was she imagining things, or did she detect faint traces then of a Midlands accent? He might be one of those chameleons, changing his coloration to match wherever he was. When he went to get coffee from the buffet he offered to bring one for her, too; she longed for coffee but refused, because she knew she’d feel obliged to pay for it with conversation.

  She would have been quite sure, once, that this man was trying to chat her up – there was a certain persistent, burrowing sweetness in his attentions. However, that was out of the question now. When Greta put on her reading glasses to look in the mirror these days, she saw that her skin was papery and sagged on her neck and under her jaw, her face was criss-crossed by tiny creases. This wasn’t all the effect of her illness; much of it was just ordinary ageing. She had spent yesterday afternoon at the hairdresser’s, having her hair cut and highlighted so that she could present a cheerful, sanely coping front to Kate, but still her brown hair was full of grey. Also, Greta couldn’t help believing that her problems, which were gynaecological, showed on the surface somehow, barring her definitively from the world of sexual attraction. That part of her life was over. She didn’t want to read online about women who’d had what she had and gone on to enjoy exciting sex lives for years afterwards. She dreaded the smiling pretence even more than the bleak truth.

  WHEN GRETA WHEELED her suitcase off the platform and onto the main Liverpool concourse, she expected to catch sight of Kate at once. The rush of emotion in this expectation took her by surprise: most of her feelings, over these past months, had been muted, as if she were persisting through grim effort. She anticipated with her whole body the instant when she would see Kate and they would be enfolded together; looking keenly around, she seemed to see her daughter already stepping forward – handsome, tall, spirited – out of the crowd. They weren’t the kind of mother and daughter who were always cuddling and touching, but surely they would embrace now, after everything that had happened.

  Then she heard her phone ping and had to rummage for it in her handbag and put her glasses on to read the text. Kate would be about twenty minutes late – no hint of regret or apology. And Greta knew Kate: twenty minutes meant half an hour, at least. Her disappointment as she read was infantile. What did it matter if Kate was a bit late? But the idea of her daughter’s waiting for her ha
d seemed for a moment like a rich gift of the good luck she had got used to doing without. She had been trying so sedulously not to want anything too much. Quickly she wiped her eyes with a tissue from her sleeve. Nothing had gone wrong; everything was still on track. She could use the time to get herself the coffee she had wanted earlier. Wheeling her suitcase over to one of the café franchises in the station, she didn’t see until the last minute that her companion from the train was there ahead of her, sitting at a table out on the concourse, beside the dark little den where the coffee was made.

  He hadn’t seen her, either: he was bending his head over his coffee, blowing on it to cool it. At least she couldn’t accuse him of stalking her; it looked now, if anything, as if she were in pursuit of him. Away from the train, with his mac on and a paisley silk scarf tied around his neck, he didn’t seem quite so unfortunate; there was even something touchingly contained and self-sufficient in the way he sat absorbed in the steam from his cup, not texting or talking on his phone, no phone in evidence at all. His skin was rough and pitted, but the slanting lines and planes of his cheekbones were striking in profile, beautiful like those of a peasant in an old Central European photograph, though Greta thought he didn’t know it. When he did notice her – a wheel on her suitcase got caught on the leg of one of the wrought-iron cafe chairs, scraping it along the floor – he put down his cup with what appeared to be genuine pleasure at seeing her again. Concerned, he asked if everything was all right. Probably her nose was flushed red – that was usually what happened when she cried. She explained brightly that her daughter had been delayed, and she’d decided to have a coffee while she waited.