The Dream Operator

by Mike O'Driscoll

  He was two years younger than Freddie with a year still to go in primary school. He had no friends his own age but this had never appeared to bother him. He seemed to always be content within himself, untroubled by solitariness. He had no siblings, which was why, Freddie suspected, Mrs Price, didn’t mind him hanging out with an older boy. He guessed that she looked on him as a sort of older brother for Mouse, figured he’d keep Mouse out of harm’s way.

  But that afternoon Freddie had other plans which didn’t involve Mouse. “She won’t be home,” he said. “She’s gone to town with her mum.”

  “Dammit!” Mouse said, voicing his new favourite swear word as they entered the kitchen. “She should see this.”

  “See what?”

  Mouse pushed the straggly blond hair from his eyes and scanned the room, as if checking for the presence of unwanted listeners. He always did it when he had something he considered really important to tell. “I found a spaceman on the Worm,” he confided, voice even quieter than usual.

  “Oh yeah,” Freddie muttered, distracted. He was thinking about Jenna, waiting for him by the church. “How’d you know it was a spaceman?”

  “How do you think?”

  Freddie shrugged.

  “His suit, you idiot. A space suit.”

  “Right.”

  “So c’mon, let’s go.”

  “I can’t, not this afternoon.”

  Mouse looked a little crestfallen. “Why not?”

  “I got schoolwork, Mouse,” Freddie lied. “They have exams every summer at comp. Mum freaked on me last night ‘cos I haven’t done any revision, said I have to stay in and work.”

  “Tough. What about tomorrow?”

  “Sure.”

  “Right. I’ll see you then.” Mouse started to leave but stopped by the door. “I nearly forgot. The spaceman said something good was going to happen.”

  “Great, you be ready for it, Mouse.”

  *

  Jenna was waiting by the church wall. On the bus from school they’d arranged to go and explore the ruins of the World War Two radar station up on Rhossili Down. They followed the track from behind the church out on to the open moor, to where it began to climb steeply to the beacon six hundred feet above the sea. They raced up the last hundred yards, past thick clumps of yellow-flowered gorse, then collapsed beneath the beacon, laughing and gasping for breath. Worm’s Head stretched out west into the sea at the southern end of the bay. He wondered if Mouse had gone out there to see his spaceman and felt a small quiver of guilt at having lied to him.

  Jenna stood up. “Gimme a minute,” Freddie cried. “I’m not ready.”

  “Suit yourself.” She set off running and he watched her go, trying to rehearse what he wanted to say. He was desperate to tell her how he felt but he wasn’t sure how. He’d never had a girlfriend before, never even considered it. He would have asked his brother James for advice, but he was away at university. Ellen, his sister, seemed to be going through a phase of hating the world in general and boys in particular, a condition he figured to be natural to most seventeen year old girls. A classmate, Gareth Lewis, said he’d been out with loads of girls and that Tracey Jones in 7D had let him feel her tits. That wasn’t much use to Freddie as he wasn’t at all sure whether Jenna even had breasts yet. All he wanted to know was whether she’d be his girlfriend and not just a friend, like she was with Mouse.

  When she disappeared around a bend in the track he got up and followed. Taking a short cut behind a stretch of gorse, he dropped into the dense bracken that bordered the trail and crawled through it to the edge of the track. A minute passed with no sign of her. Two more minutes rolled by and he began to get anxious. Finally, after another thirty seconds he rose and was about to call her name when she sprang up out of the ferns on the other side of the track, startling him. “Got you!” she said, before sinking to her knees, laughing. “I knew you were going to try that.”

  He felt stupid and mildly embarrassed but her laughter was infectious and soon he was laughing right along with her. She sprang up and ran then, and he chased after her as she dodged in and out of the ferns and along thin winding paths through vast expanses of richly scented heather. Soon, they came in sight of the radar station. There wasn’t much left apart from concrete foundations, the stumps of brick walls and further down the hill, great slabs of broken, upheaved masonry.

  “It feels strange here,” she said, clambering up on the raised foundations, to stare out at the sea. “Like the ruins have secrets they don’t want us to know.”

  He hadn’t known Jenna that long, although she’d lived just outside the village for almost a year. Her parents were chefs and had moved to Rhossili from Brighton after buying a guest house and restaurant. They’d sent her to a private school in England but she’d hated it. She told him she’d deliberately set out to get excluded and had finally managed it when she’d caused half a dozen of her classmates to have nightmares by pretending to be possessed. That was just before Christmas. First morning back after the break she was waiting at the bus stop for Bishopston Comprehensive. She made a point of not talking to anyone and in school she acted like she didn’t give a toss about anything. Like everyone else, Freddie had thought she was a stuck up cow and after his initial curiosity had worn off he didn’t pay her much attention.

  It was through Mouse that they became friends.

  One Saturday near the end of February they were down at Fall Bay picking through the flotsam washed up by a recent storm. You’d be surprised at what the sea washes up on those shores. One time he found a twisted metal frame Mouse said was the ruins of a shark cage but which his dad said was a hang-glider’s frame. He preferred Mouse’s interpretation. Another time, Mouse had found an oddly shaped blue bottle with a cork in the neck. He told Freddie the bottle had drifted all the way from South America and that it contained a coded message for help from a boy who’d been kidnapped and held for ransom twenty years ago. Freddie never saw the message but he liked the idea of it.

  A group of surfers out in the bay had caught Freddie’s attention and he was daydreaming about riding twenty footers when he’d heard Mouse shouting his name. He looked and saw him at the edge of the rocks, beckoning. There was someone with him and as Freddie ran over he recognised the new girl from school. She was crouching over something at the base of the rocks.

  “What is it Mouse?” Freddie asked, wondering why the girl was there.

  “Look at this,” Mouse said, pointing at a clump of seaweed.

  The girl lifted one strand of the seaweed and then another, uncovering a long, dark brown creature. “What d’you reckon it is Freddie?” Mouse said.

  “I’ll tell you what it is,” the girl said. “It’s a mermaid.”

  “It’s not a mermaid,” Freddie said, sure of himself.

  She looked up at him, squinting. “Oh yeah? Then what is it?”

  “Some kind of fish,” he ventured.

  “It’s not a fish. Who ever saw a fish like this?” She lifted another frond of seaweed, exposing a sleek, earless and whiskered face with large, dark eyes.

  “It’s a seal,” he said. “A dead seal.”

  “No,” she said, touching the face. “It was a mermaid. They turn into seals when they die so that when their bodies are washed up we won’t know the truth. Otherwise people would hunt them. You know, like they did with unicorns and trolls.”

  Freddie looked at Mouse. The younger boy was entranced. “We should bury it,” Freddie said.

  “No.” The girl stood up. She was an inch or two taller than Freddie, with short, tomboyish black hair and lightly freckled cheeks. “We have to do it properly.”

  He stared at her, confused. Her mouth seemed to be on the verge of laughing though he had no idea at what. Her eyes danced with defiance and after a moment he stared down at the seal. “Do what?”

  “We have to build a funeral pyre. She deserves it.”

  Mouse grinned. “Yeah. That’s exactly what we have to do.”

>   Freddie knew it was a just a seal but he was impressed with the ease with which she’d won Mouse over. Not many kids could do that. Maybe she’s like him, he thought, always on the lookout for the strange and peculiar, never satisfied to take the world at face value. For his sake he let her take charge, following her instructions to help Mouse build a small pyre of driftwood while she went home to get matches. She returned thirty minutes later with a box and a plastic bottle full of petrol she’d taken from her dad’s garden shed. They laid the seal on top of the pyre, and she doused it with petrol and struck a match to the driftwood. It went up with a sudden whoosh and the three of them stood a few feet back, feeling the heat of the flames on their faces. Hearing a voice to his left Freddie turned and saw that the girl was reciting a prayer. Mouse joined in, and after a moment, so did he.

  “What would you want that secret to be?” he said, watching her, remembering how she’d wept as the seal burned on the pyre.

  “Something out of this world.” Her voice was soft and distant. She was quiet a moment, then turning to him she said, “You think the Germans bombed this station? Maybe there are ghosts here.”

  “Probably. It was the war so I guess some people must’ve been killed.”

  She jumped down off the wall. “I wish we could see them.”

  “Let’s look around,” he said. They spent twenty minutes wandering through the foundations and the concrete trenches that had connected the different buildings. Jenna talked about the people she imagined had lived there, young soldiers, nervous and lonely, spooked by glimpses of ghost ships on moonlit nights. Some would sleep on their watch dreaming of their families far away, pining for home. Others would take out letters from their girlfriends, read them, and kiss the pages. As she spoke Freddie watched her, entranced by her narrative. He thought she was beautiful and wondered what it would be like to kiss her. They had come to the ruins of an outbuilding below the station. She sat down on the low, shattered wall and fell silent, and her eyes seemed to glisten with tears. “What’s wrong?’ he said, sitting beside her.

  “I’m sad.”

  “What about?”

  “That it’s just stories. That none of this is real.”

  He understood what she meant though he couldn’t articulate it. Remembering Mouse’s spaceman, he said, “You want to know a secret that’s really out of this world.”

  “What?”

  “Mouse found a spaceman. He wanted to show me this afternoon.”

  “A spaceman. Wow, cool. Why didn’t you go with him?”

  He shrugged. “I wanted to come up here with you.”

  She laughed and he felt his cheeks redden. “That’s really sweet, Freddie, though if it was me I’d have gone to see the spaceman.”

  “You would?” He laughed to hide his disappointment.

  “A spaceman, Jesus.” Her eyes glittered in the early evening sun. “I want to see him, Freddie. You think Mouse will mind?”

  “Why would he? He said the spaceman told him something good was going to happen. Maybe he meant us going to see him.”

  “Or maybe he meant this,” Jenna said, leaning in close to him and pressing her lips against his. He felt his heart stutter and his head spin even as she sprang away with a laugh.

  “Hey, wait!” he called.

  “Catch me,” she shouted. “If you can’t I’ll be gone forever.”

  He hesitated a moment then sped after her.

  *

  The next day they discovered that Mouse knew all about the lie. He’d phoned Jenna’s after leaving Freddie and her mum had told him who she was with. Freddie felt bad about lying to him. Mouse was easily hurt, particularly since the terrible discovery he’d made the previous year. His parents had told him they’d adopted him when he was two. As far as he was concerned, that meant his real parents had abandoned him. For a while he’d hated them, not able to comprehend why they had done that. Soon though, he began to take pride in his status as someone who didn’t quite belong. He sensed strange possibilities in the fact that he wasn’t who he’d always thought he was, as if this uncertain identity offered him a new kind of freedom.

  Freddie tried to play on that freedom by suggesting that he didn’t have to be mad at them; that he should see himself as smarter for having figured it out.

  “I didn’t,” he said. “He told me.”

  “He?”

  “The spaceman—he knew you were together. He wanted to know why you were up there and not with me.”

  “How could he know where we were?”

  “Up there.” Mouse pointed towards Rhossili Down. “At the radar station.”

  Before Freddie could say anything else, Jenna spoke up. “He was right, Mouse—we should’ve gone with you. Only Freddie wasn’t ready yet to believe.”

  Freddie wasn’t sure what she was suggesting, but she’d caught Mouse’s attention. “Believe in what?” he said.

  “In something good happening. Isn’t that what the spaceman told you?”

  Mouse nodded, glancing at Freddie.

  “Well something good did happen—I kissed Freddie.”

  Freddie felt awful for a moment, anticipating Mouse’s hurt, but then he saw a smile break across his face as Jenna went on. “And now it’s only fair that I do this.” She leaned over, grabbed Mouse’s face and kissed him on the mouth. He was as startled as Freddie. His face crimsoned and he spluttered, but it was with laughter.

  “Oh my God,” he said, “what was that for?”

  “Because you’re my friend, Mouse. You’re the two best friends I have in the whole world and I think that’s what the spaceman meant—that we’d understand this and we’d promise that we always would be best friends.”

  Well of course that settled it for Mouse. He insisted that they each swear a solemn oath of everlasting friendship. Freddie was a little troubled by this and—truth to tell—a little jealous at the implication that Jenna would care as much about Mouse as she did him. Yet he comforted himself with the knowledge that while they were both her best friends, only he was her boyfriend.

  Having confirmed their everlasting allegiance in the proper manner they set off to see the spaceman, cycling out to the Reserve Centre on the cliffs above Worm’s Head. The Worm is really a mile long tidal island made up of three limestone humps connected by rocky causeways. Legend had it that the long, thin island was the petrified remains of a giant sea serpent, with the outer, tallest point being the serpent’s head rising up out of the sea. People laughed at the story but Mouse liked to embellish it with his own vivid imaginings.

  The afternoon was hot, the distant horizon a blur of shimmering haze. The three kids scrambled down the cliff path to the sand and crossed onto the causeway that formed the Worm’s tail. Mouse led the way, keeping up a running commentary on the sea serpent and how it had been turned to stone by Queen Victoria’s chief wizard because of all the ships it had wrecked around the Gower coast.

  All kids make-believe but most outgrow the habit by the time they’re seven or eight. Mouse was different. When he first got to know Mouse, Freddie was shy and prone to daydreaming as a way of combating his loneliness. He was eight and the family had just moved to Rhossili from Bristol. James and Ellen were already in comp, which meant he went straight into primary school on his own among kids who seemed to already have all the friends they needed. Seeing Mouse playing alone in the schoolyard, seemingly absorbed in his own private game, he thought he had found a kindred spirit. But for Mouse solitariness was a spur, the thing that drove him to develop and refine his imagination, allowing him to create an inner life that more than compensated for whatever loneliness he might have felt. It seemed to Freddie that this make-believe life was as meaningful to Mouse as anything in the real world. After a certain age, most kids begin to see things for what they are, not what they could be. They lose that willingness to let themselves go, to look sideways at the world and see weirdness and wonder in the ordinary. Maybe Mouse thought Freddie had something of that ability. Clearly h
e saw the same thing in Jenna, and watching her as she listened to his story, allowing herself to be caught up in his imaginings, Freddie reckoned that Mouse was right.

  After thirty minutes they crossed Devil’s Bridge, a strip of rock over the middle head beneath which the sea had carved a passage. Soon they were on the outer head, standing at the base of the steep, foreboding crag that gave the island its name. There was an odd tension in the air, and as Freddie stared up towards the summit, he felt a sense of hesitation and doubt. Perhaps it was Jenna’s presence, a fear that it would be impossible for them both to witness Mouse’s fantasy at the same time, and yet the excitement in her eyes made it obvious she didn’t share his anxiety.

  Following Mouse they clambered up the steep slope to the top of the crag and found it empty. Freddie turned a full circle to confirm what his eyes already knew. “Mouse,” he said.

  “He’s here.”

  A shadow moved across the cushion of grass. He heard Jenna gasp, “No way!”

  He spun round and saw, rising up over the seaward edge of the crag, the spaceman. Hanging motionless in the air, a big white hulk of a thing, more alien than man, he thought, with his great domed head and the sunlight gleaming off the place where his face should have been. “Jesus God,” Freddie whispered, stumbling back into Mouse.

  “I told you, Freddie, I bloody told you,” Mouse said, as he stepped forward. “‘Lo Mr Spaceman,” he said, small and insignificant against the enormity of the spaceman’s suit.