The Dream Operator

by Mike O'Driscoll

  No voice came back to him, just the moan of the insistent breeze through the coarse grass and brittle sea holly. He moved in a shorewards direction, clambering down one dune and up the next, calling Jack’s name. He felt a tight knot in his stomach as he forced himself up the yielding slope. It sapped his strength and robbed him of breath. He reached the top, lightheaded and panting. Cyril scampered up the path behind him, tongue lolling out of his mouth. He stopped abruptly and turned, just as a figure burst out from the scrub.

  It was Gary. Caleb’s relief dissipated when he saw the boy was alone. “Dammit Gary,” he snapped. “Where the hell is Jack?”

  Gary’s grin slipped. “I—I’m sorry Caleb. We didn’t mean to –”

  Caleb saw that he had frightened the boy unnecessarily. “It’s all right. Just tell me where he’s hiding.”

  “I didn’t see,” Gary said.

  Caleb’s fear intensified. “Which way did he go?” he said, trying to keep his voice calm.

  Gary looked around, then pointed back towards the marsh. Caleb took his hand, and together they headed down the slope. The sweat chilled his body as he raced over damp scabious, calling out. The minutes ticked by and dusk began to roll in from the bay. Odd terrors clawed at the frayed edges of his mind, and his limbs shook with fatigue as he searched through the trees. What had he been thinking, especially after what Jack had been through? Please, please, let him be okay.

  A whispered sound caught his attention. He turned and saw the dog running along another path back into the dunes. “There,” he shouted at Gary, a sharp pain piercing his side. He staggered after the boy and dog. Beyond them, he caught a glimpse of yellow through the scrub, lost it, then saw it again, unmoving on the ground behind a stunted tree. His heart was pumping furiously and the cry of despair was on his lips as he came round the tree and nearly crashed into Gary, who stood over the motionless form.

  Jack was grinning up at them. “What took you so long?” he said.

  For a second, Caleb teetered on the edge of rage, then he fell to his knees and hugged Jack tightly to his chest.

  *

  Caleb turned into the school carpark. Beside him, Jack stared blankly ahead. He’d not spoken in the six minute drive from the doctor’s surgery to the school. After a dreamless week, the nightmare had returned to ravage the boy. Caleb had heard him cry out some time after midnight. He’d run to Jack’s room and had found him sitting upright, his gaze fixed on nothingness. Traces of whatever haunted his dreams lingered in his eyes even after Caleb had woken him, but he had been unable to ascribe it a material substance or meaning. And all the doctor had had to say was that there was nothing physically wrong with Jack. Jesus Christ—what did he expect? Broken bones? A gaping wound? Caleb had wanted answers, not fucking platitudes. Tell him why Jack was having these nightmares, what was scaring him. Instead, he’d had to listen to bullshit reassurances about Jack’s overactive imagination and how they should maybe monitor his TV viewing and ease up on the bedtime stories. Polly would be relieved, even if she had more or less predicted what the doctor would say.

  Caleb turned off the ignition, his body tense with anger and concern. He glanced at his son in the passenger seat. Jack looked too fragile, he thought, too lost inside his own head. He wanted desperately to hug the boy, to let him know that he would do anything for him, but he was afraid that Jack would somehow see the truth.

  “You sure you want to go to school?” he said. “I can take you home if you want.”

  “I’m okay,” Jack said.

  Caleb felt sick with anguish. He didn’t want to quiz his son but felt he had no choice. “Jack, the other day, when you asked Gary about thirteen o’clock, what did you mean?”

  “About what?”

  Caleb forced a smile. “When we were down at Oxwich. You asked him what happens at thirteen o’clock.”

  Jack seemed confused. “I don’t know what you mean, Dad.”

  Caleb wondered if his son was being evasive. “Maybe, like Rat and Mole, you feel that it’s better to forget some things?”

  Jack shook his head, making his uncertainty evident. “I never heard of it.”

  Caleb believed the boy. He leaned over and hugged him, trying to squeeze strength into his son. “I love you, Jack. You know that?”

  “Yes.”

  “I won’t let anything hurt you.”

  “Dad,” Jack said, his voice muffled against Caleb’s chest. “I don’t want you to go.”

  Caleb stifled a sob and patted him on the back. “I got work, Jack.”

  The boy pulled away from him. “I didn’t mean –” He stopped then, kissed his father and got out of the car. Caleb waved after him as he ran across the schoolyard, but Jack didn’t look back.

  Alone, his eyes watered, and he felt overwhelmed. His love was compromised by a sense of powerlessness, of having failed his son. He felt guilty too, at being afraid, not for Jack but for himself. He was ashamed of his weakness and angry at what he saw as the failure of his reason. He caught sight of something in the rear-view mirror, a child’s bewildered face staring at him from the back seat. Jack’s, he thought at first, but after a moment he realised it was his own, as it had been thirty years ago. The cheeks were pale, the lips thin and trembling, the eyes haunted. Caleb felt the glacial creep of fear across his skin. Wanting to connect with the abandoned child, he reached up, touched the mirror, and saw the child’s features blur and reassemble themselves into his own, harrowed face.

  *

  Discordant sounds frayed Caleb’s nerves and a harsh chorus of jeers echoed from the far end of the bar. He realised Polly wasn’t really listening to what he was saying. Her attention was elsewhere; on the football match playing on the big screen television, or maybe on the people gathered in front of it. As if sensing his scrutiny, she returned her gaze to him and said, “I’m sorry, Cale. It’s just that I thought we could, you know, talk about something else.”

  “Something else?”

  She sighed. “We don’t often get the chance to go out for a night. We’ve both been under a lot of strain lately, I thought it would do us good to be alone together.”

  Caleb frowned, frustrated at what he perceived as a lack of concern. “You don’t think we owe it to Jack to –”

  “Please don’t play the guilt thing on me,” she snapped. “Of course I’m concerned, but Jesus Christ, Cale, we just have to be patient.”

  “I think we should take him to see a specialist.”

  “If they continue, yes, maybe we should take him back to Dr Morgan and get him to refer Jack to someone. But just for tonight, can’t we talk about something else?”

  It was a reasonable request, he knew. Jack’s problem had taken its toll on them both. And yet, he was wary of looking away. “All right,” he said. “Let me just say something, then we’ll talk about whatever you want.”

  Polly’s lips tightened and she leaned back in her seat, away from him.

  “The common thing is a stranger,” Caleb said. “Think about what that means. For a kid it signifies danger, right? What are kids told all the time? Be wary of strangers, and this is drummed into their unconscious.” He spoke quickly, trying to flesh out his still sketchy interpretation, how Jack’s fear of strangers was manifesting itself in his dreams as someone coming to kidnap him. Stories in the papers and on the TV about kids being abducted and murdered. That young girl found strangled in the woods outside Cardiff a couple of months ago, and more recently, the teenage boy whose naked body was found beaten to death on the sands along Swansea foreshore. Kids weren’t impervious to things like that, he said. They made connections, even if they weren’t conscious of doing so. In bad dreams, the most irrational things became real.

  Polly finished her bottle of Corona. She tried to sound reasonable but Caleb could hear the frustration in her voice. “It’s not that what you’re saying isn’t plausible, Cale. Maybe it is, I don’t know. I’ll read up on it. But I think you’re becoming obsessed with this. What chance h
as Jack got of forgetting the bloody dreams if you keep on about them?”

  “Ignoring it isn’t going to make it stop.”

  “It sounds to me like you don’t want them to.”

  “Shit, Polly, what the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  She got up from her seat. “I want to go,” she said. “I can’t talk about this anymore.”

  Caleb grabbed her arm and said, “This is Jack we’re talking about.”

  She pulled her arm free. “No it isn’t. It’s you.” She hurried from the bar.

  He sat there for a few moments, immobilised by panic and fear. How could she not sense the threat to their son? Slowly, his panic subsided and he followed her out onto the street. He saw her crossing the main road to the carpark. A mild rain was falling and the lights of Mumbles flickered on the dark bay like fragile memories. Caleb felt alone as he walked after her, distanced from everything he held dear. How does a man get back what he’s lost, he wondered, puzzled at the question. He wasn’t even sure what he had lost. Some memory, or maybe some part of his self-belief.

  Anna, the baby-sitter, was watching O.C. when they got home. Jack was fine, she said. Not a peep since she’d put him to bed at nine. Polly asked Caleb to check on him while she ran Anna home.

  Alone, Caleb headed upstairs. A wave of relief swept through him when he saw Jack was sleeping soundly. The muscles in his legs quivered, and fearing he would collapse, he went and sat on the edge of his son’s bed. Wan light edged into the room through the open door, falling on Jack’s slippers and a couple of Playstation games at the foot of the bed. A Manchester United poster was on the wall over Jack’s head, and other posters around the room depicted Bart Simpson and scenes from the Harry Potter movies. Caleb felt a surge of tenderness. The sight of The Wind in the Willows on the night table filled him with sadness and a deep sense of regret.

  I’m sorry, Jack, he thought, as he stood up to leave. The boy stirred and rolled onto his back. Caleb’s breath caught when he saw Jack’s eyelids were flickering crazily. His lips moved as if he were trying to speak, but no words came out, only the muted sibilance of dreams. “Jack,” Caleb said, but the sound was less than a whisper. He turned, saw the small armchair beneath the dormer window. He pulled it a little closer to the bed and sat in it. Jack continued to make soft, indecipherable noises on the bed, one hand above the sheet, the fist clenching and unclenching.

  Caleb wondered what his son was seeing. He tried to will himself inside Jack’s head, to witness the slow unfurling terror. “Stay with it, Jack,” he said to himself. “Be strong.”

  Jack began to toss and turn on the bed, his legs kicking sporadically beneath the sheets. His voice grew louder, but Caleb was still unable to recognise the sounds as words. His movements became more agitated, more violent. Caleb leaned forward in the chair, peering intently at his son. He anticipated some kind of revelation, as long as he didn’t weaken and let his attention falter. That was the mistake he had been making, he realised, as Jack started to scream. Waking the boy too soon. Have to let him go further into it, see what he needed to see. Maybe then it would end. Recalling it in the daylight hours, his reason would overcome the nebulous fear. Jack was writhing now, his lips pulled back in a rictus grin as scream after scream tore from his throat. As awful as it was, Caleb felt he had to let it go on, for Jack’s sake, he told himself, his vision blurring through tears.

  The only problem was Polly, standing in the doorway, screaming at him to make it stop. He tried to explain what was happening, but it was no good. She ran to the bed, gathered Jack up into her arms, and carried him from the room. Caleb sat there, appalled at what he had done. At what he had failed to do. The terror wasn’t Jack’s alone, he felt. It was his nightmare too.

  *

  Throughout the day Caleb struggled with his fears, barely able to keep his mind focused on his students. Their demands oppressed him, their need for reassurance wore him down. He grew more irritable and short-tempered, so that for the final session of the day, forewarned by the morning’s students, fewer than half the afternoon group turned up. Afterwards, he sat alone for an hour in his office, trying to make sense of what was happening to him. The persistence of Jack’s nightmare scared him and his need to make sense of it had become an obsession. He had come to feel connected to it in some way, to believe that the key to deciphering it lay somewhere in his own past. All day he’d dredged his subterranean memories but had come up empty. As he left the building after six, he wondered if in fact he was afraid to probe too deeply. Maybe there was something there he wasn’t ready to deal with, some secret he didn’t want to discover about himself. He stopped in the Joiner’s Arms on the way home, but found neither relief nor pleasure in the two pints of Three Cliffs Gold he drank, nor in the company of the few regulars who acknowledged his presence but who, faced with his patent desire for isolation, left him to his fretful ponderings.

  Jack was watching TV in the living room when Caleb got home. He glanced in at his son then walked by the door and on through to the kitchen. Polly was reading a book at the kitchen table, sipping a glass of red wine. She looked up as he came in and managed an uneven smile. “You okay?” she said.

  Caleb shrugged, took a glass from the wall unit and poured himself some wine. “How is he?”

  “Okay, I think. Keeps asking about you.”

  “What’s that?” he asked, meaning the book.

  She showed him the cover. It was called Children’s Minds. “Picked it up in town today. Thought it might help us figure out what’s going on with Jack.”

  “And does it?”

  “It helps me.”

  “I’m going to sit with him tonight,” Caleb said. “Watch him. I’ll try to wake him before it takes hold.”

  Polly frowned. “You really think that will help him?”

  “As much as that book.”

  She got up from the table and took his hand. “Caleb, can you be honest with me?”

  “I thought I was.”

  “About Jack, I mean. About why he’s so afraid for you.”

  “Jack’s not afraid of me,” Caleb said, agitated.

  “That’s not what I said,” Polly said, confused. “Jack’s afraid for you—not of you. Why? Have you told him something? Something you’re not telling me?”

  Her questions shook him, filled him with doubt. “Don’t—don’t be stupid.”

  “I’m not,” Polly said, her voice rising. “I’m scared for our son and I’m worried about you. You’re not yourself, Cale. Something’s eating you up.”

  “Please, Polly,” Caleb said, trying to hold himself together. “Don’t presume you know what’s going on in my head. Can you do that? Is it asking too much?” He didn’t wait for an answer but hurried upstairs where he stripped off his clothes and took a long, almost scalding shower, as if to burn away the stain of some long forgotten sin.

  *

  Later, Caleb apologised to Polly and told her he’d look at the book she’d bought. Maybe it would help him understand what Jack was going through. After dinner, he went to his son’s room. Jack was already tucked up in bed, and despite the broad smile that crossed his face, Caleb could see none of his usual vitality and zest for life.

  “Mum said you’re going to stay.”

  He stood by the edge of the bed, feeling a sudden, intense pang of guilt. “That’s right,” he said. “Keep the bad dreams away.”

  “Are you going to read to me?”

  Caleb saw Wind in the Willows on the night table. He shook his head. “Not tonight.”

  “D’you read it when you were a boy?”

  “Yes, though I’d forgot most of it until I started reading it to you.”

  “D’you forget your dreams too, Dad?”

  Caleb stared at his son, not sure how to respond. He wanted to say the right thing, but he no longer knew what that was. “Most of them.”

  “Did you dream about–”

  “Ssshhh, Jack. Go to sleep.”

  Jack w
as silent a moment, his face troubled. Then, as if having plucked up the courage, he said, “Will I die if I dream at thirteen o’clock?”

  Caleb leaned over the bed and took hold of Jack’s hand. “No,” he said, squeezing. “There’s no such time as thirteen o’clock.”

  Jack nodded but seemed unconvinced. He reached up and kissed his father’s cheek. “I’m okay, Dad, really,” he said, but Caleb saw a wariness in his eyes.

  “I hope so, son,” he said, letting Jack’s hand fall. He moved to the window and sat in the armchair, watching as Jack turned on his side to face him. He’d brought Polly’s book upstairs, but after flicking through the first few pages, he let it fall to the floor and focused his attention on his son.

  He woke that night with the sound of screams still echoing in his head. Violent tremors shook his body as he crouched in the shadows, clenching his teeth to still their relentless chatter. A sickly, cloying dread hung in the air, and his flesh recoiled from its touch. Through the fog of dreams that swirled all round his semi-conscious mind, he recognised Polly’s voice, splintered to a thin, fragile whisper “Caleb.” she was saying, “what happened to you? Where have you been?”

  The stench of foam was in his nostrils, the taste of salt on his lips. “Poh-Polly?” he groaned.

  “Jesus Cale.” Her arms were around him and he felt the heat from her body seep into his cold, damp flesh. “It’s okay, you had a nightmare.”

  He saw the darkness outside the kitchen window. He was crouched on the opposite side of the room, the slate tiles wet beneath him, and the distant pounding of surf reverberating in his head. Cyril cowered behind Polly, as if wary of him. “How did I get here?” he asked.