by Guy Burt
I dream so rarely that the process of dreaming always surprises me. I remember people I have spoken to who dream every night, remembering all the stories and images that go through their heads. I have read that dreams are the mind’s way of sifting what it has encountered, making sense of it all. If so, my mind must have a different way of ordering itself. But sometimes there are dreams, like this one; impressions of things. Faint images. Certainly what I remember of the dream has that sense of surreal dislocation that seems to be the nature of dreams.
But I know that the impression is wrong. There is nothing surreal or distorted about the voice in the dark. It really was like that. The words really were alien, making no sense to me, feeling ill-fitting and uncomfortable in my ears. And it really was dark, too.
I wonder for a moment why I should be dreaming about this, now; and then I know the answer. I look across to Anna’s bed. She isn’t there.
She is sitting by the window. She’s taken the chair from the writing desk in the corner, and has pulled the shutter open a little. Her arms rest on the sill, but she’s looking at me; she must have heard me wake. I prop myself up on one elbow.
‘What’re you doing?’
I see her smile in the faint glow of the street lamps. ‘Nothing. I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep, that’s all. What about you?’
‘Just a dream,’ I say.
‘Yeah? You were thrashing about. Was it a nightmare?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘I stopped having that ages ago. Just – kind of weird.’
‘Oh,’ she says, and I can hear that she’s smiling. ‘That kind of dream.’
‘What?’
‘You know. A sex dream. Was it like that?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘Just an ordinary weird dream.’ I can feel myself blushing.
‘You can tell me, you know. You won’t shock me. Was it kinky?’
‘Anna, it wasn’t a wet dream, for God’s sake.’
‘Are you sure? You were kind of breathing heavily for a while.’ She’s still smiling; I can hear the mischief in her voice.
‘It wasn’t like that,’ I say.
‘Boring.’
I think of something to change the subject. ‘How long have you been there?’
‘About twenty minutes.’ She’s wearing a long T-shirt that comes down to her knees. Her arms and legs look fragile in the almost-dark. I look at my watch.
‘It’s twenty-past four,’ I say.
‘So?’
‘Well – so you woke up at four o’clock.’
‘And?’
I wait for her to make the same connection I have, and, eventually, she does.
‘Don’t be daft, Alex. I don’t wake up on the hour, every hour, you know.’
‘You used to,’ I say.
‘Yes,’ she says, and turns to look out the window. ‘But that was a long time ago.’
‘Still …’
‘No, Alex. I just woke up, that’s all.’
I lie there watching her for a while, but she doesn’t say any more. At last I say, ‘You can talk about it, you know. We don’t have to go on pretending that nothing happened.’
‘Is that what you think we’re doing?’ she says. Her voice is detached, distant; I can’t see her face properly any more. The edge of the shutter cuts across it.
‘Well – sometimes I think that—’
She interrupts. ‘I told you. We were kids. That’s what it was. People change. There isn’t anything to talk about.’
‘Not even Jamie?’ I say, but she doesn’t reply.
I stay awake, watching her, for a while, but she doesn’t turn and she seems to have forgotten about me. Eventually I put my head back on the pillow and close my eyes. The air coming in at the open window is cool at last, after the day. I can picture Anna at the window, can imagine the view she can see: the little square, the line of mopeds at one side, the plane trees at the other, the little church she pointed out to me on our first day here. I can imagine the low clouds over the city, catching the light from the street lamps, bathing everything in a dull orange glow. When the cloud is right, you feel you could just reach up and touch the sky. You know how it would feel, too; like cold velvet.
The thought puts into my mind a memory of another sky, which I really could reach up and touch. The sky Anna made.
I am almost asleep when something she has said before comes back to me. Some deaths are more important than others. What did she mean by that? But before I can work it out, the words are gone, lost in the memory of her voice and the soft touch of the darkness.
The valley swelters in the heat, and I wish to myself that the lies we told were true: that we were heading for the beach, to dive and splash and have swimming races, rather than for the chapel, to tend to the hermit. Everything about the hermit worries me or scares me now; his leg, which may be dying; the lies he has told us; the secret of the gun, hidden in its case in the belltower. All these things press in on my mind, and as we walk I stare down at my feet and imagine the trouble we might be in if anyone were to find out.
Jamie opens the chapel door, and I see his expression change to a kind of panic.
‘Shit,’ he says, and runs inside.
‘What is it?’ I say, hurrying after him, but a moment later I can see for myself.
The hermit is not where we left him, against his pew. He is halfway across the floor to the chapel door, and he is face down; his arms are spread wide and his wounded leg has dragged a long smear of blood on the floor. He isn’t moving.
‘Is he dead?’ I say.
Anna crouches at the hermit’s side. ‘I can feel him breathing,’ she says. Her voice sounds thin and frightened – I’ve never heard it like this before. ‘We need to turn him over.’
Jamie and Anna take the hermit’s shoulders and I take hold of the leg that isn’t wounded. We turn him over. The hermit doesn’t make a sound; his face is flushed and sweating. His mouth is open slightly. The dust from the floor has made his clothes grey, and it strikes me unnervingly that he looks like a ghost. His head lolls loosely as we drag him back to his place.
‘He’s dying, isn’t he?’ I say. Jamie glances at me, and I am expecting him to tell me to shut up, but he doesn’t. Anna is watching the hermit closely, staring into his face. His eyes are closed. His breathing is quick and shallow.
‘The bandage is all dirty,’ Jamie says, pointing. He’s right. Where before there was a neat, white dressing, there is now an untidy tangle of bloodied cotton and dirt from the floor. The hermit has dragged the bandage half off himself.
‘What was he trying to do?’ Anna says to herself. She’s already set to work, getting water and fresh bandage out of the bag we’ve brought. I watch in silence as she strips off her T-shirt and puts it to one side.
‘OK,’ she says. ‘We’ll have to do it again. Jamie, come here and hold him. Alex—’
‘I know. The belt,’ I say.
‘Yeah.’
We know what to do now, and we work more efficiently. Anna swabs the wounds clean and flushes away the stale discharge from them with water. I keep the tourniquet tight while she works. She wraps the new bandage steadily and carefully, packing it with cotton wool. I can see her ribs move as she breathes, pale in the chapel’s strange, coloured light. There is blood on her arms and hands, and in one long streak across her belly, before she is finished. The hermit doesn’t move at all. Jamie cuts strips from the sheet Anna was going to use as a curtain, and she finishes the dressing with those, fastening them securely in place with the sticking plaster from the roll. She brushes her hair back with her forearm, and I notice she is sweating.
‘There.’
We look at the hermit, and at each other. I slacken my hold on the belt.
‘He must have been trying to get outside,’ Jamie says.
‘Why would he do that?’
‘I don’t know.’
Anna says, slowly, ‘Maybe he was – you know. When people are ill and they don’t think straight.’
<
br /> ‘Maybe,’ Jamie says.
‘Do you think he’ll die?’ I say.
Jamie says, ‘No, Alex.’ Anna is silent. After a moment, we both look at her.
‘I don’t know,’ she says at last. ‘Maybe.’
‘Maybe?’ Jamie says. ‘You said he would be OK! What do you mean, “maybe”?’
Anna looks at him steadily. ‘We’ve done everything we can,’ she says. ‘We shouldn’t have left him alone, that’s all. From now on, we never leave him alone, OK? Never. Not till he’s well again.’
‘What do you mean, “maybe”?’ Jamie says again.
Anna is silent for a time. Then she says, ‘We’ll just have to see.’
‘What happens if he dies?’ Jamie demands. There is anger and panic in his voice. ‘What happens to us then?’
‘I don’t think he’ll die,’ I say, trying to sound confident.
‘Christ, Anna! What if he dies and we haven’t told anyone?’
‘Better for him if he dies than if we go and blab about it,’ she says.
‘What does that mean?’
‘You know.’
‘I don’t know,’ Jamie says hotly. ‘What?’
‘You know he doesn’t want anyone to know about him. He trusts us.’
‘Yeah,’ Jamie says, with disgust. ‘He trusts us. What about us trusting him, then? You know what – what must have happened to him.’
‘Maybe it was a mistake.’
‘What about …?’ Jamie nods his head upwards towards the belltower.
Anna says, ‘Look, we’re not going to tell anyone, OK? We’ve got to look after him.’
‘Why?’
She leans closer to Jamie; her expression is fierce. ‘Because there isn’t anyone else. We’ve got to look after him as well as we can.’
I am beginning to realize that I don’t understand parts of the conversation. ‘What happened to him?’ I say. ‘What was maybe a mistake?’
Jamie and Anna stare at me for a moment. ‘His leg,’ Anna says.
‘Of course it was a mistake,’ I say. ‘He wouldn’t have cut it on purpose.’
She shakes her head. ‘He didn’t cut it, Alex,’ she says. ‘It’s not a cut, is it? You saw what it looked like.’ She turns back to Jamie. ‘We have to stick together,’ she says. ‘We have to. We can’t get scared now.’
‘And if he dies?’
‘We’ll think about that when it comes,’ Anna says. She sounds calmer now, more in control. ‘Maybe it won’t come, though. He looks strong, don’t you think? Maybe he just needs to sleep for a while.’
I am picturing the wounds in the hermit’s leg. Anna is right; they don’t look like cuts, not really. They look different – more like—
Abruptly I can see that what I have thought of as two wounds might actually be one wound; that instead of something cutting the hermit’s leg on the front and at the back, something might actually have been forced right through it, making a neat, small hole at the front and – somehow – a larger, ragged one at the back. I blink. I start to see what Anna has meant.
She and Jamie are still talking, but the tone of their voices has quietened. I know Jamie’s fears will go away eventually. I know also that there is no question now of us telling anyone. There never has been any question of it; it has been decided right from the start that we shall look after the hermit. Anna has decided it. Right from – when? I think and think, but I can’t remember at what point the decision is made without slipping away, and Jamie has told me not to do that around Anna. I tell myself that I must ask him about this: about whether I should still be careful, or whether Anna is now enough of a friend for her to know about the going places in my head business as well.
Anna is saying, ‘We need to make him some kind of bed, too. It isn’t right keeping him like this. We can do that and then move him onto it.’
Jamie nods. I nod too, joining in the decision even though I know it makes no difference. I feel again like things are shifting reluctantly in my head; the same way I have felt around Jamie when things he has said have opened up corners of my understanding. I am beginning to understand the hermit. There is a mystery here, but it is one that is starting to reveal itself to me.
What’s strange is that at the same time the hermit is becoming more understandable, it feels as though Anna is becoming less so. I steal a look at her as she is examining the hermit’s face, and what I see in her eyes makes no sense to me. Jamie is right to want reasons and explanations for what we are doing, but he doesn’t yet know – as I do – that he’s not going to get them. It is a strange thought, but it comes to me with a great weight of certainty. Anna’s reasons are hidden away somewhere deep inside her, and it may be that we’ll never know what they are. I think for a moment, with a kind of satisfaction, of her naked body tiny against the dark bulk of the cliff, and know that she will never make sense to me.
I wake late, and my eyes feel sticky and still tired. For some reason it feels a lot as if I haven’t slept at all, and I wonder briefly whether the patterns of my sleep have been disturbed some way. I remember waking in the night, and seeing Anna by the window; that, at least, suggests that my normally deep sleep has become erratic.
Anna is gone, her bed empty and the chair where she leaves her clothes bare. I get up, stretch, and see that there is a sheet of paper on the writing desk: a note.
Gone to the dandelion clock. Got an idea to make a theatre so I’ve taken a sheet. Come and meet me.
It doesn’t say that, of course. For some reason, memories of the dandelion clock – of that time – keep intruding. I recall a vague impression of a voice in the darkness, but muffled somehow; part of the dream that woke me. I pick up Anna’s note and skim through it.
Letting you sleep cos you look like you need it. I’ve gone to check out the times for this lecture thing; I’ll see you for lunch – how about 2 o’clock by Santa Croce? Same place as yesterday. PS. Do you know you snore?
I smile to myself and put the sheet of paper back. It’s only a little after nine; she must have made an early start. I find myself wondering if she ever went to bed at all, after I saw her. Perhaps she stayed the rest of the night looking out into the sleeping city. She looked like she had something on her mind, and I wonder, as I pull my clothes on, what it might have been.
The lecture is part of her excuse to be here: something political. She has told me about it on the bus, briefly; the details are complicated and she glosses them quickly. Some political theorist will be giving a series of talks, and one of them may be relevant to her thesis. It means she can take time off to make the trip and still claim it as research. It means we can be together for a while, which is all that matters.
Her suitcases are still in the corner of the room, slung in a pile. It is strange how Anna can sometimes be so neat – almost fastidious – and then sometimes be so casual. Jamie would have stacked the cases properly, I know.
There are little stickers on the bag she took with her on the plane: travel stickers with the names of places on them. Some are old, very worn and faded; others are newer, the colours bold. Kenya. London. Rome. Paris. Florence – quite an old one, that; perhaps from the last time she was here, with Jamie and me; perhaps even bought the morning before she stumbles across me sketching in the shadow of the Campanile. Bonn. Prague. Budapest. Bucharest. The cities form a strange, poetic map in my mind’s eye as I fumble with socks and shoelaces. I feel I could reach out and trace Anna’s past through them: the past we have shared in some way (Rome, Florence, London) and the past that has formed this other Anna, the Anna that I begin to feel I don’t really know at all. The scuffed edges of the stickers could be a pattern, I feel; like a join-the-dots, where the picture that emerges once the connections have all been made is a picture of Anna, a key to understanding her. I sit on the end of her bed and stare at them, try to imagine where she has been, what she has done and seen, the people she has spoken to. All of these things must have helped shape her – or at least, shape the Ann
a I don’t know.
It’s then that it happens.
It is like an impact. The city lurches away from me, seems to shift, and then lurches back in place again; but it is wrong. It has changed somehow. Something is different.
I stare around me at the room, but nothing is altered in the slightest. Outside, the sounds of traffic and people are the same. Everything is normal, except that in my head I know that the city has – moved, changed, somehow. I can still feel my head reeling with the sense of sudden movement.
I sit for a long time, wondering what has just happened to me.
When I finally leave the room and go out into the city proper, I keep looking about me, as if to catch a clue out of the corner of my eye. There is nothing. The river is bright and there are crowds on the bridges as I pass by. Florence is just as it has always been.
I sometimes think I have never understood anything in my life – never really learnt anything – until it is too late, and the knowledge is useless to me. Things have passed by, and by the time I have worked them out, they are gone. There is a kind of torture in seeing the past so clearly, so close to me, and not being able to change it, to step in knowing what I know now and do the right thing. Of course Florence didn’t move; but Florence did move, all the same. The dream was right, too; the hermit was gone, long gone, but there was a shadow of him in some dark, enclosed space. The hermit was still there, and there were things I knew were wrong, and I should have known. There’s no dodging that; I should have known. But I was distracted – by her beauty, and by the way that the sunshine in the old city made it feel like nothing could ever be wrong again. It was that simple.
High up in the valley I can see the headlights of a vehicle trailing across the hills, but otherwise everything is still. There are the lights of the boats out in the bay, and the town itself glowing sleepily in its low cradle of land. It looks peaceful and safe, like my mother always thought it was.
Chapter Twelve
The bright morning sunlight catches the colours of the pictures, brings them alive. The living room is filled with images – a lifetime’s worth. Moving among them, I am caught in a flow of paintings, and the more I feel them around me, the more I know they are wrong.