Dream Sequence

by Adam Foulds

  The carriage was very full now. Kristin wished she could make her suitcase disappear as people packed around it, holding the overhead bar and acting like she and her case weren’t there, reading their phones and papers, listening to headphones, disseminating a general dislike from their stiff, stoical postures. Arriving at her stop, Kristin had to get up somehow and push her way out. She did so, crushing herself through and out onto the platform. After the other passengers had streamed past her she felt her heart surge with panic when she saw that she was almost eye to eye with Henry. He was in a poster—she knew the image already very well from the internet—his face slashed with shadows, a skull in his hand. You couldn’t say that it was a sign, exactly, given that she was there to see his final performance and of course it would be advertised, but still it felt like something, like the click of synchronization, like all the little gears in the watches in the airport were whirring for a reason, ticking, ticking. Looking into Henry’s familiar face, Kristin’s panic gave way, its heat flowering outwards as a great serenity. Kristin had grown used to such sensations after meeting Henry—itching hands, a burning in her chest that could wake her in the night, thick waves of sexual desire, a bright spinning in the pit of her stomach. This was all part of the revelation of Henry and the nature of love. A whole new body had been revealed, feverishly radiant and spiritual, connecting beyond her own limits to the whole universe.

  Vast escalators carried Kristin back up to the surface of the world. She exited onto a loud street at Holborn and looked around to see that she stood at the bottom of grand buildings. The architecture was serious and historical, a bit like parts of old Philly only better. It was Britain as Kristin expected it to be, a storybook enchantment, but cut through with rapid traffic and shops. Kristin found the map to her hotel on her phone.

  The Windsor Hotel was in a narrow house on a long street of repeating buildings along which large trees with pale, peeling trunks at intervals filtered the light. They were in leaf, the tender green translucency of spring. The season was further advanced than it was back home. Not only had the flight thrust her into the next day, it had carried Kristin further into the future, her future. At the reception desk, Kristin was given her key card, the door codes, the wifi password, the breakfast hours, and directed upstairs. The room was tiny with a tinier bathroom attached. There was a wardrobe, a single bed with a textured green coverlet, a bedside table with a digital clock and a half-size kettle with cups and sachets of drinks. A window looked into a bricked inner space with pipework and other windows in which trapped sounds of voices and traffic softly diminished. This was not a room that Ron would have put up with for one moment, even with its excellent location. But for Kristin it was ideal, a little London nest to rest in. Ron had a scrupulous eye for faults in hotel rooms and restaurants, for customer service that was less than eager. He would complain, authoritatively, and waited for discounts and compensation that he always got. It was a striking early lesson for Kristin in how rich people did things, how negotiable high prices actually were.

  Kristin unpacked. She balanced her toiletries on the rim of the bathroom sink. She placed her wadded clothes on the shelves of the wardrobe and hung up blouses and skirts. At the bottom of her suitcase her dress lay folded. She put her fingers into the sleeves and lifted it up. Barely a crease. Midnight blue. The cut was kind of fifties, demure but flirtatious, with a flattering broad band around the waist and a skirt that kicked out just below the knee. When she had had bangs cut into her dark hair, two different people had told Kristin that she looked like Zooey Deschanel.

  Kristin lay on the textured bedcover to rest, maybe sleep for an hour. Her eyelids were hot and fragile; they trembled as though they couldn’t stay closed. She felt warm and unclean in the clothes she’d travelled in for hours, halfway across the world. She decided to take a shower. She really was tired: it was an effort to lift the weight of her limbs up from the bed.

  The water pressure was good but the cubicle was confiningly small and the shower head shot out a narrow diameter of water so that she had to keep moving, bumping into the plastic walls, and sweeping the water over her body with her hands. She had depilated thoroughly in preparation for the trip. Her hands slipped easily over the smooth shapes of her hairless flesh. Dry again, she put on the short white robe provided by the hotel and once more lay down on the bed.

  Kristin woke up feeling cold in a small hotel room in a foreign country, unsure of the time, daylight flaring around the curtains over a small window. Somehow, she had become unplugged from her fate. She lay disconnected and as she remembered everything, she thought herself a fool, a fantasist. She had travelled all this distance, spent all this money, for no good reason. Kristin had decided this many times in the past. Sometimes, she found relief in the thought. The burden of having to act, to undergo this humiliation on behalf of the future was lifted from her and the ordinary, spacious, uninteresting freedoms were restored. But immediately the other inextinguishable thought returned. It did now. It would never leave her. Some things just are, inescapably true. You don’t even know how you know. Her fate was inexorable and wonderful. She would have to meet it whatever she did. Kristin slid her legs off the edge of the bed and stood up. There was the day to get through before the night that would lead on to tomorrow and her first encounter.

  Outside, London continued about its business, adding another busy day to its long history. Kristin picked her way through the pedestrians and found a nearby Pret A Manger sandwich place to eat in. She liked these places, the brushed metal surfaces and music, the reliable quality of the food. She often went in Philly and she felt a little ashamed to immediately resort to these home comforts here. Later, when she was more awake, she would look for authentic British food. She took her choices from the chiller cabinets over to the baseball-capped staff behind the counter. She paid a surprising amount of money—cartoonishly bright coloured paper money—for a sandwich lush with mayonnaise, a small juice and a packet of raisins coated in sickly hardened yogurt. Around her as she ate she heard through the music snatches of the conversation of two women in business suits sitting at the next table. They were trying to identify someone in an anecdote. Tall? No. With the trendy glasses? That’ll be him. Through the windows, Kristin watched people passing, the traffic of cars and buses and taxis, the indescribable strangeness of London that was so near at hand.

  She wiped the corners of her mouth with a stiff paper napkin. What should she do to fill her time? She had her list of things to see. The Houses of Parliament. Buckingham Palace. The butterfly exhibit at the Natural History Museum—that she would go and see with Henry, a trip she’d planned since she read about the live butterflies you could walk through. Trafalgar Square. The British Museum was nearby. She could go there.

  Somehow the place was hard to locate although wide, grand and obvious once found. After airport-style security where her bag was checked and she passed through the empty doorway of a metal detector, Kristin entered the museum. She discovered a huge white space of light and geometry and a surf of voices. In its centre was another closed building. This wasn’t what she was expecting. She’d pictured wood and brass and history. There were shops in this area and information desks and chunks of ancient sculpture staring blindly about. The size of the place, the movement of the crowd reminded Kristin of her travelling and made her feel tired. There was a coffee shop over on the right, hissing and clattering, and she headed for caffeine. More queuing, more money and Kristin had a coffee. She took it to a table and sat. A school party walked past, two teachers and a group of chest-high children, maybe nine or ten years old, in blue pants and sweaters. A few of the girls had their heads tightly wrapped in Muslim headscarves.

  Kristin sipped her coffee. An old couple sat down at the table with a tray of tea and cakes. They separated out their cups and plates. Having smiled at Kristin, they then stopped still and seemed to be taking a moment to recover, like swimmers just out of rough water. They br
eathed. They rested their eyes on near things, the tray, their hands, the tabletop.

  “Hi,” Kristin said. “How are you? I’ve never been here before. It’s so big.”

  “Oh,” the woman said. She seemed surprised to be spoken to. “Is that right?”

  “It is. My first time in London. I might be spending a lot of time here in the future.”

  “I see. We don’t come that often. We’re from Bedford, aren’t we?” The man nodded, confirming. “You don’t know where that is, I expect.”

  “I don’t.”

  “We come for the big exhibitions but it wasn’t all that and the tickets even with the discount are a lot.”

  “I thought the museum was free.”

  “Not for the Vikings.”

  “What should I see?”

  “What should she see? Egyptians are the main thing. Mummies. Greek sculptures as well. I mean, there’s plenty to keep you busy.”

  “The mummies it is, then. You have a wonderful day.”

  “Just looking forward to getting home again.”

  A crowd shifted around the glass cases with their phones out, taking photos. Large labels explained the Egyptian gods, the bird-headed god, the dog-headed god, the dynasties, the soul sitting in the celestial scales, their whole alien world, hard and gold with bright painted eyes. Kristin read and looked at illustrations as she waited to get closer. Stopped figures among rushes, maps of the Nile delta, ancient names as weird as those down in Mexico. She knew about ancient Egypt, of course. Everyone did. It was standard museum stuff, famous world history, like the Eiffel Tower and dinosaurs and Michelangelo’s David and wooden battleships. But she’d never stopped to look at them, to look at actual real Egyptian things. What had they known, these people? What had been lost? How could all these glittering, elaborate, wise things have just fallen out of the world? Mysteries had been lost.

  Kristin arrived at a body in a painted sarcophagus. The person in the coffin was small, dry, an autumnal brown colour, modest, bandaged, just a little dead guy who had no idea what was going on around him. She wanted to help him understand. He looked so lonely. It was terrible. She felt sorry for him, sad at the sight of other tourists on the other side of the glass staring down. She wanted to be his friend. They could leave together, him with his peanut-head and noseless face and little mousey teeth, talking in his magical language of bleeps and chirps. She felt he had plenty to tell her and that she of all people would understand.

  People pressed behind her. She had to leave the little pharaoh to his fate.

  So many treasures, jars and gods and so many other things to see. Rooms and rooms of it. Kristin was too tired to absorb any more. She found her way back to the main hall where she bought a bookmark of Egyptian hieroglyphs as a souvenir. She should get things for Suzanne’s kids at some point but she couldn’t think about it now.

  On her way back to the hotel she bought a salad in a plastic box to eat in her room.

  Just one more night, one more sleep, and she would be seeing Henry again in the flesh.

  She fell asleep easily, heavily, her mind replaying remembered motion of trains and planes and blurry streets. She awoke in darkness and saw the unlikely digits 3:33 on the bedside clock. They shed faint green light onto the table’s surface. There was a red light on the wall, the TV on standby. There was a dingy orange light behind the curtains. There were voices somewhere, a drunken argument or celebration, she couldn’t tell. Perhaps they had woken her up. Certainly she was now sharply awake. The voices faded. She heard the sound of some metal object, a can probably, bouncing on a sidewalk. The voices were gone.

  Unused to a single bed, Kristin kept turning and coming to its edge, the verge of falling. She stopped moving and impersonated perfect relaxation as a way to fall asleep again, lying completely still on her side, serene on the pillow, her knees bent, her hands palm to palm beside her face. She was hungry but ignored the feeling. She kept her eyes closed like she was hiding in a game and counting to a hundred. She waited.

  *

  The alarm, persisting, broke apart Kristin’s nonsensical dream about a plumbing problem of blockages and awful, humiliating smells and Suzanne on the phone to their mother and contractors filling her empty house. Everything was fine, naturally, as Kristin heard busy morning noises and saw her hotel room again, but a sense of sordid disrepair and disorder lingered like a judgment.

  Kristin had set her alarm for the hotel breakfast and she quickly dressed and went downstairs, following the signs for the dining room. She hardly needed to check the signs: the warm, animal smell of frying would have guided her there. She stood obediently by the instruction to wait to be seated. The room was small, cozy, swarming with pattern on carpets and curtains. Only one table was currently occupied: a middle-aged couple, the man lean, chewing, the woman round-shouldered with grey-blond hair, her back to Kristin. They looked foreign somehow, like their mouths would not produce English when they spoke.

  A waitress appeared. She did speak English but with a European accent. “Good morning. You are room?”

  “My room? I’m in twenty-two.” A flash of memory: the clock showing 3:33. Who knew what that meant?

  “Okay.” The waitress made a note in a ledger. Kristin thought she might be a student, that she wasn’t serious in her role of being a waitress. Perhaps it was the way her outfit didn’t quite fit. Her black polyester skirt ballooned at her waist. “Please. Where you like.” She gestured at the room.

  Kristin sat down at a circular table. The couple said something to each other. German, maybe.

  The waitress handed Kristin a menu card. “Tea? Coffee? Orange juice? Apple?”

  “Coffee, yes, and orange, please.”

  The waitress walked away, looking at her pad.

  In the tinkling silence of plates and flatware, Kristin felt awkward. She called across to the other table, “Good morning.”

  “Good morning to you,” the man answered. His wife turned around and smiled. “Good morning,” she said. Her voice shocked Kristin, a smoker’s voice, deep and rasping. It was as though she had revealed a deformity. The man had a bland face, square, narrow-lipped, without emphasis. He looked like someone who did a technical job, Kristin thought, some kind of engineer, or one of the chemists Ron used to work with. That thought put Kristin off. She said no more and the silence was resumed.

  *

  After all the hours, all the days, the letters, she was there. How had the day gone? Didn’t matter. It had gone. After breakfast, she’d returned to her room to digest. More sleep and waking and fear as large things moved into place. She’d gone out for a walk with no purpose, an elongation of streets and people and trees and pigeons. She’d gone back, eaten a sandwich, rested, slowly dressed and finally left. Down into the racketing yellow violence of the underground trains and up among glassy buildings and now here she was at the Barbican, a multi-storey arts centre like a shopping mall or a car park or a government building. On grim grey walls Henry’s face appeared beside other pictures, one of a ballet dancer posed inside a floating ribbon, the other a gasping, gesticulating conductor with flying hair.

  Kristin found her way to the cloakroom and handed over her coat. She wore a dark blue cardigan over her dress. She walked, holding the strap of her handbag. Henry would not appear out here in the audience area but he was somewhere in this building.

  Kristin was early. She bought a small, expensive pot of nuts from a bar and sat on a black leather bench eating them one by one, feeling squirrely and very alert.

  She bought the program for Hamlet. She also picked up every flyer from one of the information stands. She didn’t know why. She piled them beside her on another seat while she peered at the familiar rehearsal photos in the program.

  A bell sounded. The Barbican theatre was now open for this evening’s final performance of Hamlet. Kristin went in immediately, leaving the flyers
behind on the seat. As she approached the young girl in a black uniform checking tickets, Kristin felt a rush of fear that there would be a problem and she’d be refused but of course this did not happen, and Kristin was told fourth door on the left and the girl held out her hand to the next customer behind her.

  There were two actors on the stage, dressed in modern military uniforms, already acting, pacing up and down between poles with CCTV cameras mounted on them, staring out towards the audience. The seats around Kristin started to fill. Bells for five minutes, three minutes, one minute. Kristin twisted around to see all the people behind her and above on the sloping shelves of the upper levels. Two ushers appeared at the doors on either side of the auditorium, walking up and down the outside steps, checking, waiting, whispering into walkie-talkies. Simultaneously on some cue, mechanically synchronized, all the doors shut, sealing everybody inside. Music started, a few ominous notes, and a sound effect of the distant sea. The first words were spoken by the two soldiers, quick and nervous, and after a minute or so another character appeared there on stage, standing in a long coat in the gloom. It wasn’t Henry. A ghost appeared, flickering in CCTV images on a screen behind them. In the next scene the lights were bright, everybody wore smart suits or evening dresses, and Henry was right there, clearly visible. His suit and tie were black. He looked miserable. He said nothing for the longest time. Kristin felt the curved air of the transparency between them, the space from her seat to the stage. She could get up and walk to him. She could call out and he would hear her. His voice was in her ears. He spoke so much, so loudly, sometimes small and close and quiet, alone on the stage, controlling everyone in the room. When he touched the two women on stage, the tiny girl playing Ophelia, the rich-voiced, disdainful actress playing his mother, Kristin was held by a brief, numb arrest, not quite understanding the graphic, intimate irrelevance of it. (She had researched these women online some time ago, Lucy and Alexandra; she knew their marital statuses; she wasn’t worried.) Kristin resented the intermission, being driven out of her seat and into the trivial chatter and snacks and driven back in again, returned to the solidity of her seat. The events of the play got worse and worse, as she knew they did. Soon Henry had that skull in his hand, just as he did in the poster. Every image of Henry that Kristin had ever seen, every moment of The Grange and everything else that she’d found, was of this living man who she knew, moving in front of her. It wasn’t long before, in a glitter of sword blades clashing and cutting the air, Henry was dying, then dead. A horrifying sight. A few more words and it was over. It was such a relief to applaud, the final silence of the play collapsing under a wave of noise from the audience. There were whistles and cries. People rose to their feet. Kristin did. The actors came back onto the stage in sequence, Henry last of all, himself again, happy, grateful, jogging down to the front to bow. There were cheers. Kristin whooped. Henry held his hands to his heart and bowed again. He retreated, taking the hands of the actors beside him and the long line of them bowed together. They repeated this then left, the last two actors to clear the stage chatting inaudibly to each other, evidently themselves once more.