Marianne Dreams

by Catherine Storr; Susannah Harker

  ‘Best thing she could do if she’s strong enough,’ Dr Burton said briskly, picking up his case and going towards the door. ‘They often use bicycles, stationary of course, in hospitals for getting power back into wasted muscles. Tell your friend to hop on her bicycle and pedal for dear life. If her doctor agrees, of course. Good-bye. See you next week. Stay put till then, now, no jumping out of bed and bicycling for you just yet’

  ‘So it wouldn’t hurt Mark to bicycle’ Marianne thought with satisfaction. ‘I do hope he’ll try next time I’m there.’

  Later in the day she took out her drawing book and, turning to the original picture of the inside of the house, she added a little Mark on the stairs. She meant to draw him stepping down, but owing to the difficulty of making legs look as if they were walking, she found that in fact she had made him sit rather more than half-way down the staircase. To the bicycle she added what was meant to be a stand to keep it upright while Mark practised on it. This room now had no space left for any more drawings, so in the empty room, on the opposite side of the hall, Marianne drew a tin on the outside of which she carefully printed in tiny letters, ‘TOFFEE’.

  ‘Now’ she thought, ‘if I can get back there when it’s light, I’ll get Mark to practise on the bicycle.’

  It was light, and she was in the room downstairs when she found herself back in the dream that night. She was alone with the tin of toffee. Before she went up to see Mark, she looked quickly into the opposite room and saw the bicycle firmly anchored on what looked like a very solid stand.

  She had half expected to see Mark as she had drawn him, on the stairs, but the staircase was empty as she went up. Only the clock ticked steadily over the door to Mark’s room.

  ‘The clock is friendly, too,’ Marianne thought for the first time. ‘I’m glad of the clock. It comforts me, like the lighthouse.’

  Mark was sitting up in bed reading. He looked up, said, briefly but agreeably, ‘Hullo,’ and dropped his eyes back to the book.

  ‘Have a toffee?’ Marianne said, seating herself on the end of his bed.

  ‘Thanks.’ He waited while she opened the lid of the tin, and helped himself as she held it towards him. ‘Did you draw that too?’

  ‘Yes. Downstairs. I’ve just brought it up.’

  ‘Good idea.’ His eyes dropped to his book.

  ‘Don’t you ever do anything except read?’ Marianne exclaimed.

  ‘Not much. Nothing else to do. Besides I like reading,’ Mark murmured without looking up.

  Marianne was silent from sheer exasperation. Mark went on, in the same deliberately casual voice, ‘By the way, I’ve seen the bike. It’s jolly fine.’

  ‘You’ve seen it! You mean you’ve been downstairs?’

  ‘Well, the bike doesn’t seem to be up here, does it? Looks as if I must have been down.’

  ‘Oh, Mark, that’s marvellous! Was it -‘ she hesitated. ‘Did you find it difficult?’

  ‘It wasn’t awfully easy,’ he said uncomfortably. He stopped, and then seemed to take courage. ‘I did it sitting down. It’s better that way.’

  ‘Oh, of course -‘ Marianne began, but she did not finish. ‘Did you try the bicycle?’ she asked.

  ‘No. I couldn’t get on.’

  ‘Doesn’t the stand hold it steady? I made it specially thick so that it would.’

  ‘It wasn’t that. I expect it does. I can’t get up to the saddle, that’s the trouble’ Mark said, with difficulty.

  ‘I’ll get you up’ Marianne said. ‘I’m sure I could. Do try again, now.’

  ‘Not now. I’m reading.’

  ‘You’re not. I’ve interrupted you and you’ve stopped for the moment. Do come and try while I’m here to help.’ ‘It takes such ages’

  ‘I don’t mind. Please, Mark. I won’t look if you mind my seeing you going downstairs.’

  ‘There’s nothing to look at’ Mark said. ‘Only I hate it. I hate not being able just to get up and walk down like an ordinary person. I feel such a fool letting myself down the stairs like a baby.’

  ‘It must be horrible’ Marianne said sympathetically.

  ‘And it’s partly the not knowing. Not knowing if I’ll ever be all right again, or if I’m always going to be like this.’

  ‘But you will be all right! You must be! And bicycling’s the best thing you could do to make your muscles strong again.’

  ‘Who said so?’ Mark asked suspiciously.

  ‘Dr Burton. He’s our doctor. He comes to see me twice a week. I asked him about bicycling for people who’ve had your illness, and he said it was what they do in hospitals to get the muscles working again. On a stationary bicycle of course, but the one downstairs is.’

  ‘How do the people in hospital get on the bicycles?’

  ‘I suppose they have to be helped on. Oh, please, Mark, do try. We could get away from here, you know, if you could bicycle. If people in hospitals can do it, why shouldn’t we?’

  ‘All right,’ Mark said. ‘We’ll try,’ He didn’t sound very hopeful. He pushed the bedclothes back and moved awkwardly towards the edge of the bed. Marianne watched him anxiously. He hesitated, and looked at her, flushing painfully.

  ‘I can’t walk, you know,’ he said. ‘I have to sort of drag myself. It’s beastly.’

  ‘I know,’ Marianne said gently.

  ‘Here goes,’ Mark said, with a crooked smile at her. He slipped over the side of the bed and let himself down to a sitting position on the floor.

  ‘You go first,’ he said. ‘Open the door for me, will you? I’ll come down after you.’

  Marianne opened the door and went out, without looking back, which was what she knew Mark wanted. She went downstairs and waited. She heard Mark shuffle along the floor to the doorway of his room and begin a painful descent of the stairs. He sat on one step, put his left leg on to the step below and then with his hands let his body and his right leg down to the lower step. It took a long time and when he had reached the bottom step but one, he paused, breathless. He saw Marianne looking at him, and scowled.

  She said at once, boldly, ‘Mark, isn’t one of your legs stronger than the other?’

  ‘I don’t know. They both feel like cotton-wool. As if they didn’t belong to me, but if I do anything at all, they ache. I’m sick of it.’

  ‘But I do think one of them - that one, the left - is better than the other.’ ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s the one you always put down the step first, so I think it must feel stronger.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Mark said in a less unfriendly voice. He felt the leg with his hand. ‘Let’s go and have a look at the bike. You go first and open the door.’

  Marianne went, and waited by the stationary bicycle till Mark had made his way to her. She gave it a little shake to see if it were steady, and thought it was certainly firm enough to take Mark’s light weight.

  ‘Now,’ said Mark, from the floor beside her. ‘Do you think you can get me up?’

  ‘Catch hold of me and the bicycle. It’s quite steady enough. Now you pull, and I’ll pull. I’m sure I’ll get you up.’

  It was more difficult than Marianne had expected. Mark was surprisingly heavy and she had not realized that when he was pulled up to her own level his legs would take no weight at all, and she and the bicycle would have to support

  him entirely. Scarlet in the face, clutching Mark’s flesh unmercifully through his pyjama jacket, she hauled and pushed and strained, and behold, at last, he was in the saddle!

  ‘You’ll have to put my feet on the pedals’ Mark said, in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘I can’t.’ Marianne did. ‘Now, pedal!’ she said. Mark shook his head. ‘I can’t! My legs won’t do it.’ ‘Try!’

  ‘I am trying. Nothing happens, that’s all!’ Mark said furiously.

  ‘I’ll push, too, with my hand,’ Marianne said.

  She tried; but as Mark had said, nothing happened. The pedals were stuck.

  ‘It’s the bicycle. It isn’t you, anyway,’ Marian
ne said. ‘They just won’t go round. I’ll try turning them backwards.’

  The pedals went round backwards with no difficulty at all and Mark’s feet with them.

  ‘That feels jolly queer,’ he said. ‘You’re doing all the work and my legs just go round without my doing anything.’

  ‘Try. See if you can do it by yourself.’

  After a moment’s hesitation, Mark tried - Marianne saw him frown as he concentrated on the task, and she frowned herself with anxiety as she watched the pedals. At first nothing happened: they remained still. Then, very slowly, Mark’s left foot pushed its pedal down a very little, then a little more, then right down to the bottom. It stopped, and Mark looked at Marianne.

  ‘I did it,’ he said.

  ‘Good. Can you do the other?’

  He tried, but though the pedal moved slightly, it did not go down.

  ‘Then your left leg is better than your right one,’ Marianne said practically. ‘But if you practise, the right one will get better, too. I saw the pedal move a bit, it’s just not as strong. Look, I’ll move this one down with my hand, and you push that left one with your foot.’

  This manoeuvre worked well, and Mark with growing confidence pushed hard enough to make the pedals revolve so fast that Marianne had no work to do.

  ‘If you could fasten my left foot on to the pedal somehow, I could do it all by myself,’ Mark said. ‘We need one of those metal toe-pieces racing bicycles have on their pedals.’

  ‘I could tie a piece of string round to hold your foot in’ Marianne suggested.

  ‘Have you got a piece of string?’

  ‘No. But I could use my handkerchief. Oh, bother, I haven’t got one.’

  ‘Never mind’ Mark said. ‘Don’t bother now. I don’t think I’ll do any more just at the moment.’

  Marianne realized that for someone who had been in bed for so long, the effort of getting downstairs and on to the bicycle had been prodigious. She said gently, TT1 help you off.’

  ‘Thanks’ Mark said, when he was on the ground again. He looked closely at the bicycle and said, ‘it looks all right. I wonder why the pedals only go round backwards?’

  ‘Perhaps the brakes are on?’ Marianne suggested idly.

  ‘Oh gosh!’ Mark exclaimed. ‘What mugs we are! Of course the pedals can’t move when the wheels are on the ground.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t you see, this bike’s fixed on its stand so the wheels are touching the floor. So the floor’s acting as a brake all the time - of course the pedals won’t work forwards, only backwards when they aren’t connected to the wheels.’

  ‘I see’ Marianne said. What she saw even more clearly was that this discovery was a relief to Mark’s pride, since it established that no one, however strong and energetic, could have moved the pedals.

  ‘Do you want to go upstairs again?’ she asked. ‘Shall I go first and open the door?’

  ‘Yes, do, please’ Mark said. ‘I think I’d like to go back to bed.’

  He looked, suddenly, desperately tired.

  ‘Would you like me to help you up?’ Marianne asked. ‘No, thanks. You go ahead.’

  Marianne waited in the bedroom upstairs, a little anxious in case Mark should find he couldn’t drag himself up the stairs, after so much unwonted effort. She sat on the window seat listening to the drag and shuffle of his approach. Then she glanced over her shoulder out of the window. She hadn’t given a thought to anything outside the house since she had found herself there this time, she had been too much engrossed with Mark and the bicycle. Now as she looked, she saw that there was a difference from what she had seen last time. The watchers outside the fence no longer stood in ones or twos around the house - but in a solid rank, at most two or three feet apart. As Marianne looked an eyelid fell and was lifted again: another eye closed and opened. Each eye, as far as she could tell, was turned towards the lower window, the window of the room where the bicycle was standing. She moved, in an involuntary shudder. Immediately the heavy eyelids fell, one after another, opened again, and the eyes turned up and towards her.

  Marianne stepped back into the room. She turned to the door and said, as he came in, ‘Mark! THEY’re watching us. They know about the bicycle and they’re looking at us more than ever. We’ve got to get away or they’ll try to stop us. We’ve got to be quick, Mark!’ But she heard her voice in the haze of a dream, and it was only dimly that she saw Mark reach the side of the bed and say in the flat voice of complete exhaustion, ‘I can’t get up. I can’t do any more.’ Marianne saw him crumpled on the floor and moved to help him, but never reached the bed. She woke, instead, in her own.

  15. The Voices

  After all, the week which Marianne had thought was going to seem so terribly long, went as quickly as any other week of her stay in bed. Miss Chesterfield and she finished reading A Tale Of Two Cities and read Treasure Island for a complete change. Marianne mastered the principles of areas and volumes, in arithmetic, and was introduced to the decimal point. Thomas, her young brother, surprised everyone very much by coming second in a total scoring of points at his school Sports Day, and proudly brought home a very small silver cup, which he insisted should be lent to Marianne to have in her room for a week, to console her for the fact that she had not been able to witness his triumph. And, most important of all, Dr Burton was persuaded to say that possibly - ‘but only possibly, you understand, depending on how you get on between now and then’ - Marianne might get up at the beginning of the week after next for an hour. Marianne’s father drew a beautiful calendar, ruled with green ink and lettered in black, with a red patterned ring round a Tuesday, which was to be the day. It hung by her bed, and every day Marianne scored off another square and felt another step nearer to being quite well again.

  But while the day was taken up with real life happenings, Marianne did not neglect her dream life either. One of the charms of being an indifferent artist is that, while nothing you draw looks exactly as it was meant to, so it is possible to alter your original sketch to suit your needs without making it look any less lifelike. Marianne, by lengthening the bicycle stand and giving it rather more base than it had before, got the bicycle off the floor: and added, for convenience, a short pair of library steps with a hand rail, up which she thought Mark might be able to climb. After careful interrogation of Dr Burton, she put, both in the upstair and downstair rooms, the kind of rings hanging on ropes which one finds in gymnasiums, with which Mark could pull himself up from the floor to his bed or to the bicycle.

  She felt rewarded for the trouble she had taken when, in her next dream, Mark said the moment she opened the door of his room, ‘I’ve done it!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Turned the wheels. With my feet. I say, Marianne, it was jolly clever of you to think of the rings and the ladder. They make a lot of difference’

  ‘Oh, good. And you really managed to do the pedals properly - forwards, I mean?’

  ‘Yes. I took off my slipper and sort of hitched my toes round the pedal so I could pull it up as well as push it down with the good leg. And it works beautifully. It’s a jolly good bike, too.’

  ‘I’m frightfully glad,’ Marianne said whole-heartedly. ‘I’m sure it’s going to make you better much more quickly. Do you think it’s made any difference already?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I did think today when I was practising downstairs, you know, that it seemed as if I could go on a bit longer without feeling quite so dead beat.’

  Marianne discovered, in the following days, that in order to be sure to get back into the dream at night, she must draw with the pencil by day. So every day she added a small useful object to the already overcrowded rooms; and at night she and Mark now ate cold roast chicken and sausages with knives and forks and off plates. They played Monopoly and had a darts-board on the wall opposite the end of Mark’s bed, and though he was not very good, Marianne was worse. And every time she saw him, Mark could report some improvement. Soon he could use his right
leg almost as well as his left in turning the pedals. Later he told Marianne that he had climbed into the saddle with the help of the rings, but without the ladder. Marianne noticed that he was now hungry: he ate more of the chicken than she did; his legs and arms no longer looked wasted, useless things. He laughed more, teased more and could talk with less embarrassment of his weakness and with more conviction of getting well.

  ‘By the way,’ Miss Chesterfield said, as she was leaving, on the very day before the great Tuesday when Marianne was to be allowed up for the first time, ‘Mark is home again. Did I tell you?’

  ‘Home?’ said Marianne. She saw Mark so frequently now that she had almost forgotten his separate existence in the waking world and had neglected to ask Miss Chesterfield about him for a long time. ‘Do you mean he’s come out of the iron lung?’

  ‘Ages ago. Didn’t I tell you that, either? Yes, he’s been out of the lung for over two weeks now, and they said at the hospital that he’d made a remarkably good recovery and there was no need for him to have any more help with his breathing. They think he’s really turned the corner now; he’s better even than he was before he got that last cold and he’s beginning to get some use back into his legs again.’

  ‘Good,’ was all that Marianne said, but it did not express half her inward satisfaction. Before she was due to go to sleep that night, she looked at her drawings and racked her brains to think of something else to add which would amuse Mark and ensure that she saw him again that night.

  Both downstairs rooms were now almost as full as Mark’s bedroom. But in the left-hand upstairs room, so far Marianne had drawn nothing, from some curious feeling that none of the useful and agreeable objects she wanted to introduce into the house would be quite fitting. It looked surprisingly empty beside the other three crowded rooms, and this evening Marianne began to draw in it only because there was no available space anywhere else. She drew, and it seemed an inspiration, a radio. It would be nice for Mark to listen to when she was not there, she thought. She could carry it into his room and put it on the floor beside his bed so that he could turn it on or off as he wanted.