by Patrick Gale
‘What happened then?’
‘Well, I wasn’t angry at all. It was rather cosy. You showed how you could lock me away and I’d be quite safe until you got back.’
‘That turn you on?’
‘Well yes. Yes it did. And then I…No. Don’t stop. That’s good.’
How could he not dream? Recalling and recounting her dreams was one of her earliest, deepest pleasures. The reality was probably scrappier, an impatient affair of hurried bowls of cereal and egg-stained school blouses, but when she recalled girlhood breakfasts, they came back as leisurely, sunlit affairs with her mother, all attention, asking her how she slept and whether she dreamed then listening, truly listening. If asked, she could date quite precisely the moment, aged nine, when she first understood the importance of escaping the family into marriage. The unpalatable insight came on the morning her baby sister first felt old enough to assert herself and interrupted the recounting of a dream with a weary sigh of, ‘Boring!’ The interruption was allowed to pass unrebuked by their mother. A terrible moment, that. A truly terrible one.
She had tried several men on for size until she found this perfect fit. Healthy. Handsome. Good (e.g. not too extensive) fidelity record. Dead mother not overly mourned. Steady job. Own place. No unpresentable neuroses. An excellent lay. But now this. It was no more than a minor irritant. At first she actually liked the idea that he never dreamed but would listen intently while she recounted her night-narratives. It seemed all of a part with his uncomplicated maleness, like bristles or travelling light or having nothing in his bathroom cabinet but aspirin and a bottle of muscle rub. She began to boast of it in front of him.
‘He doesn’t dream!’ she would exclaim. ‘Isn’t that so like a man?’
Friends would mock her, saying he must be keeping things from her, smutty fantasies, not-quite-forgotten girlfriends.
‘Ask him,’ she’d say and would delight in watching him shrug and tell them, ‘What? So I don’t dream. Is it a crime?’ and she would cast him a proprietorial smile as he fended off her friends’ inquisition.
She liked the difference between them because in many ways he was her superior – better paid, better educated, a lifetime non-smoker, a dumper not a victimized dumpee – but in this one sphere she could hold the upper hand. Compared to him, she entered sleep like a priestess into a tabernacle and emerged, her face shining with vision.
Then a business trip to Australia left her so badly jet-lagged that her sleep patterns were jangled for several days. She lay there beside him rejecting first one elbow then the other for sleeping on, holding him until she became unpleasantly hot, backing off from him until it seemed he was invading her space, even risking waking him by sitting up to read.
Waking him? Fat chance. He simply lay there, a secretive smile dimpling his stubbled cheeks, deep in self-sufficient slumbers. And not dreaming. And it began to disturb her that in sleep he could become such a blank, however pornographic; it reflected badly on her. Any fool could dream.
So why couldn’t he?
There was a woman in the office called Magda, an older woman, who had been in therapy of one kind or another for so long she was something of an expert.
‘I’ve got this friend,’ she told Magda, ‘who’s desperate because she wants to keep a dream diary but she can’t seem to remember her dreams long enough to write them down.’
The colleague smiled in a way that was not entirely friendly and shook her head with the worldly, self-satisfied air of one who has experienced everything and for whom life holds no more nasty surprises.
‘I was just the same,’ she said. ‘We all are, tell her. You wake up and all these other thoughts start crowding in and the dream sort of crumbles. All she needs to do is write a little card saying any dreams question mark and stick it on her bedside table or her headboard or wherever she’ll first look when she wakes up. If she does that and keeps a pad and pen handy too she’ll soon find she stops forgetting. It’ll become second nature. Did you want that last Cherry Bakewell or can I?’
So she tried it.
‘Humour me,’ she told him as she stuck a little, prettily lettered card to the edge of his bedside table.
‘It won’t work,’ he said. ‘I told you I don’t dream. I never have.’
She hesitated a moment, tempted by simplicity, then remembered that his dreamlessness was a kind of insult because it meant he never dreamed of her.
‘We’ll see about that,’ she said. ‘Relax. Go to sleep. Forget the card’s there.’
And at first nothing happened. For three mornings in a row they woke to the confidential murmur of the clock radio and he read the card that asked him any dreams question mark and answered nope and turned to her with an I told you so air.
On the fourth morning, however, although he still said nope he did so with a minute hesitation and he couldn’t meet her eye afterwards.
‘There was something!’ she said, pouncing. ‘Wasn’t there?’
‘No?’
‘You dreamed. I could tell!’
‘No.’ He frowned. ‘Well. Yes. Do you know, I think I may have done.’ He laughed uneasily. ‘But it sort of slipped away.’
‘Never mind,’ she said and kissed him, triumph warming her from within.
‘I…I think it was a good one,’ he said and frowned again. ‘Damn.’
‘Relax,’ she said. ‘Don’t fret. Plenty more where that came from. Do you want your tea in bed this morning?’
They both drank heavily that night so their respective sleeps were a comatose blank, but the night after that he woke her up in his excitement.
‘I dreamed,’ he said.
‘Wha—?’ She was still half asleep.
‘I dreamed. I really dreamed.’
‘Great.’ She sat up, rubbing sleep from her eyes. ‘What happened?’
‘I was in a field,’ he began.
‘Yes?’ she prompted him at last. ‘And?’
‘That’s it. I was in a field.’
‘Is that all? What did you do there?’
‘Nothing. Just stood, I suppose. But it was a big field, huge, and so green and the sky was this incredible blue. It was like one of those Renaissance paintings you like, like the background of a Piero. You know? How he sort of paints the silence?’
‘Just you,’ she repeated. ‘In a field. Nothing else. No one else.’
‘No. But I had this wonderful feeling. Something amazing was going to happen!’
‘It was just a dream,’ she said, indulging her need to flatten his spirits in her disappointment.
‘Yeah,’ he said, slumping beside her as he turned out the light. ‘I guess.’
The next night they ate old French cheese which, cliché or no, had always produced spectacular results for her. Sure enough it seemed she had barely closed her eyes before she was living through an entire Barbara Stanwyck film, with her in the steamy lead role, fighting her way to the head office of a vast corporation by sleeping with a succession of ever more powerful and ugly, suited men. Only she didn’t sleep with them because it was enough to know they wanted her and how badly. All she had to do was press them in the middle of the chest so their eyes narrowed with lust and she seemed fairly to light up with gratification. It was all superbly art directed, with restrained nineteen-forties details everywhere, flattering lighting, a great wardrobe and even tracking shots. And there was a magnificently bizarre climax in which she left the top of the building on a sort of flying desk, leaving all the pleading suits behind and below her.
But when the alarm woke them he was in there first, eyes bright with the need to relate a boyish extravaganza involving jungles, horses, treasure and a powerfully erotic encounter with the Foreign Secretary.
‘But that’s wonderful,’ she managed. ‘You dreamed. You really did this time.’ She was about to cut in with her dream but found that somehow, in the effort of picturing his, she had lost all but a few greying rags of it.
‘How about you?’ he asked, touchi
ng her cheek with one finger in a way that had always faintly irritated her.
‘What about me?’
‘What did you dream about, Pumpkin?’ He snuggled up to her which lessened the pain somewhat.
‘Oh,’ she said lightly. ‘You know. Girl stuff.’
That night some rather pushy friends served them Cornish hen lobster for dinner. For her as for many, lobster was next only to mescalin and magic mushrooms in its ability to induce frightening dreams if eaten soon enough before sleep. She took off her make-up and climbed beneath the duvet with the same, not unpleasant queasy anticipation of a teenager taken to a slasher movie by a boy she wants to kiss.
Only the lobster affected him before it could take hold on her and she passed a shattering seven hours, repeatedly kicked or jolted awake as he became acquainted with his unconscious terrors. She returned to the office so grey-faced and lacking in concentration that two clients asked if she were unwell.
Making up the bed with fresh Egyptian cotton that evening, she accidentally knocked the any dreams? card out of sight into the mess of out-of-favour shoes, old magazines and dust bunnies that lurked under the mattress. She did not retrieve it.
Now that there was no stopping him, however, he needed no encouragement. The dreams came thick and fast and, as he became adept at remembering them in ever-greater detail, he sometimes had as many as three a night to tell her, often beginning his urgent reports before it was even light. A lot of his dreams were about food, vehicles or thinly veiled desire for world domination. They rarely featured her and when she did appear it was never in a starring role but as a sort of cute younger sister (and she projected the cute part) gamely watching his exploits from a safe distance.
In the mornings, she began to slip out of bed before he woke sufficiently to start talking. She began to grow painfully tense between the shoulderblades if dinner-party conversation strayed from coffee offers to talk of sleeplessness. She began to take more notice of Brian from Accounts, a tantalizingly self-contained, rather handsome bachelor, who played squash every evening after work and had always struck her as an eminently sensible, feet-on-the-ground sort of man. Brian, she felt sure, was not a dreamer.
SLEEP TIGHT
The child’s cry cut through the Schumann quintet Desmond was playing as he enjoyed a whisky after supper. He tried ignoring it at first and turned back to the article his brother had just published in a journal. The Global Village, he read, Towards a Dialectic. But the cry came again, more urgently, jangling his nerves and sending his glance skittering across the text. He swore under his breath, knowing he was being quite unreasonable, set down his book and glass and climbed the stairs.
‘Coming,’ he called out as cheerfully as he could.
The boy, Hamish, cried, ‘Quickly! Please!’
‘I’m here,’ Desmond said, turning on the landing light and letting himself into the smaller spare room, his boyhood room, where he had thought to make the child at home among books and kites and ancient toy bears. ‘Whatever is it? I thought to find you murdered after such a row.’
Hamish was sitting stiffly upright against the headboard, his eyes wet in the moonlight. ‘It was the Moth Lady,’ he said softly.
Desmond sighed, ‘Her again,’ and turned on the boy’s bedside light, thinking it would comfort him.
‘No!’ Hamish cried out. ‘No light! It makes her worse. It’s the light that brings her.’
Desmond duly flicked off the light again, startled by the glimpse it had afforded of the boy’s drawn, tear-stained face. ‘Okay,’ he said and sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Hamish, I thought we’d discussed this. There’s no Moth Lady.’
‘But there is!’
‘Well. There is in your dreams but in real life you’re quite safe from her. There are moths because it’s a warm summer night and they follow the lights and come in at the open windows. But there are none in here. They’re all downstairs with me and my reading light.’
This rash stab at levity brought on another whimper.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘I’ll close your window. How’s that? You’ll still get fresh air from the open door. Better?’
There was a sniff and he could tell the child was nodding.
‘Good boy. No more dreams now. Sleep tight.’
He returned, via a much needed top-up, to his brother’s supremely tedious article. His brother worked for a charity and was forever implying that this was a nobler pursuit than Desmond’s picture restoration, although he earned three times as much. His salary had done little to leaven his prose style.
Desmond disliked children as a rule, his brother’s in particular. He found them tedious and unrestrained. He associated them with noise, mess and primary-coloured plastic and regarded any friend embarked on parenthood as lost to a hostile power until further notice.
Hamish was an exception. Wary, thoughtful, bookish and apparently without friends, he reminded Desmond of himself in boyhood and it was a happy accident that he had acquired him, and not one of the more typical specimens, as a godson.
Hamish’s unmarried mother, a curator and old friend, had often brought him to stay – cautiously at first, then with more confidence once she saw how he and Desmond warmed to one another, but this was his first visit on his own. She was away at a conference for two nights in the nearest university town and had dropped Hamish off en route.
‘I shan’t ring,’ she said. ‘It would only get him all churned up. But of course you can call me if there are any problems. There shouldn’t be, though.’
For a seven-year-old he was, indeed, a remarkably easy guest. While Desmond worked in his shed, he spent contented hours either curled in the shade reading a book or wandering the paths around the marshes and reed beds that surrounded the cottage, armed with a little magnifying jar and a pocket guide to insects. He had no allergies or irritating dietary fads but politely ate whatever food Desmond set before him.
An unobtrusive boy, he repeatedly put Desmond in mind of a characteristically mordant phrase of his mother’s: too good to live. Desmond would miss him when he was gone and wondered if it would be thought sinister if he invited him back at the tired end of the summer holidays. Unmarried men had to be so careful around children these days and the precautions had a way of arousing, unbidden, thoughts of the very deeds they were designed to prevent. Hamish’s mother could always be invited too, of course, but, being an adult, she required active hospitality whereas the boy required as little attention as a demurely self-contained whippet. Until now, that was.
The music had come to an end and there was no sound but the usual soughing of the night breeze in the reed beds and the persistent tapping of insects against the windowpane nearest to his lamp. Hamish’s slightly hoarse, unbroken voice was so unexpected in the studious gloom that Desmond sloshed his drink on the upholstery in surprise.
‘She’s back,’ Hamish told him. ‘She wants to take me with her.’
‘Jesus!’ Desmond shouted. The child’s mother had not breathed a word of this neurotic fear of his. Perhaps it was put on? A piece of manipulation born of resentment at her self-absorbed absence?
Hamish lingered on the edge of the pool of light and Desmond remembered his fear of the bedside light upstairs. Curious child! The boy’s plump lower lip was trembling and he shivered. He had come down without his dressing gown and slippers and even in July the house was prone to draughts.
‘Come on,’ Desmond told him. ‘Come and sit on the sofa and tell me all about the bloody woman.’
Hamish climbed obediently onto the chaise-longue, tucking his legs up beside him as though afraid of what might lurk underneath.
Feeling a great upswell of emotion, an unfamiliar mix of ordinary compassion and intense, heartwarming awareness of himself as a fatherly protector, Desmond unfurled an antique patchwork quilt he kept on one of the sofa arms for the bitterest nights and tucked it around him. ‘There!’ he said. ‘That’s better.’
The boy nodded, still wretchedly wan.
‘Cup of cocoa? I can make some for us both.’
‘No!’ Hamish almost shouted, adding softly with tragic politeness, ‘Please don’t leave me, Desmond.’
‘I won’t. Good Lord! We didn’t eat so much cheese with supper, did we?’ Desmond sat back in his armchair, abandoning The Global Village for the time being. Perhaps the child felt the lack of a father. ‘Tell me about it,’ he said. ‘Sometimes you have to talk about bad dreams to make them stay away.’
‘She’s not a dream.’
‘But…Very well. If you say so. Who is she?’
‘I told you. The Moth Lady. She’s very thin and sort of…whispery. She’s naked and she has compound eyes and antennae like brown feathers. She doesn’t speak but she just uncoils her proboscis and touches me and I sort of feel her words. She wants to take me and I don’t want to go.’
‘Well you won’t. You’ll stay right here with me.’
‘Please don’t laugh at me.’
‘Sorry. I wouldn’t dream of it. Why does she want you?’
‘I can’t tell. But she wants to wrap me in a leathery cocoon so I can’t move.’
‘So you’ll become a moth too?’
‘No. For…I think it’s for food.’
Desmond sighed. The boy had obviously spent far too long hunting dragonfly in the glare of noon. Perhaps he even had a touch of sunstroke. Desmond put a hand to Hamish’s forehead but it was cool and slightly clammy. ‘No one is taking you for food or for anything else,’ he assured him. ‘You curl up there and go to sleep. You’re quite safe. If the Moth Lady or anyone else comes for you, I’ll spray them with poison and stick them with a pin for you to admire in the morning. There there. Only joking. Don’t take on. You’re sure no cocoa?’
‘No, thank you. Desmond I…I think I’ll be safe here. Won’t I?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Are all the windows closed?’
They weren’t, of course, because it was July and the house would have swiftly become stuffy. His practice was to leave the dining room’s window open and its door closed so that cooler air could be drawn in but no insects could see his reading light to be drawn in too.