One evening in February he found himself in Blockbuster, looking for a film he couldn’t name. He was twice becalmed at pub bars, both times with clients, having remembered what he wanted to drink, but then forgotten it again. On both occasions he bought a glass of Chardonnay, which was what he always drank.
Once again, too, he found himself hesitating in the midst of jotting a note at work: apparently unsure not so much of what he was going to write, as much as to the precise physical nature of the act. He hadn’t forgotten how to use a pen, of course. It was more a question of choice, like recalling whether one played a tennis backhand with one or two hands on the racket. When he eventually started writing, his handwriting looked odd for a while.
But it was not until the next month that he could honestly say that he started to think about any of these things.
On the fourth of March he dreamed. This was not in itself unusual. He dreamed as much as the next man, the usual intermittent cocktail of machine-like anxiety or amusing but forgettable trivia. On the fourth of March he dreamed of something different. He didn’t know what it was; could not, when he awoke, remember. But he was distracted as he sat with his first cup of the day, feeling as if some recollection was hidden just behind a fold in his brain. He stood, stared out of the window, and did not move even after Amanda had come down after her shower.
She rummaged in the cupboard, looking for a new box of her current brand of herbal tea. ‘What are you thinking about?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘Why have we got so many olives?’
‘Hmm?’ He turned to look at her. The memory felt neither closer nor further away. She held up a jar of green olives.
‘There’s three of these in there.’
‘You didn’t buy them?’
‘No.’ She held the jar so he could see the label: Waitrose own-brand. He always did the Waitrose shop, and did it alone. Supermarkets made Amanda irritable.
‘Then I must have bought them.’
‘You don’t like olives.’
‘I know.’
Ten minutes later she was gone, off to work. David was still in the kitchen, sitting now with a second cup of tea, no closer to remembering his dream. All he could recall was an atmosphere of affectionate melancholy. It reminded him of another dream from five or six years before. This had been of his college, of returning there alone and walking the halls and corridors that had shaped three years of his life, back when the future seemed deliciously malleable. In the dream he’d met none of his friends from that period, and had notably not encountered the girl with whom he’d spent most of that time. The dream hadn’t been about them, but about him. It was about absence. About some distance he had travelled, or perhaps failed to come, since those days; a period now backlit by its passing, at the time merely the day to day. The dream he could not now remember had something of this about it too, but it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t about college. It wasn’t about anything he could recall.
It was enough to nudge him into awareness, however, and at the end of the day he sat in the living room, after Amanda had gone upstairs, and thought back over the previous couple of months. He considered the missing [4], the drinks without a name, remembered also standing one afternoon in Soho Square and gazing at the shapes of the buildings that surrounded it, as if they should mean something more to him than they did. At the time each of these non-incidences, these failures to mean, had seemed distinct from each other, distinct from anything at all. Now they did not. Once gathered together, they referred to a whole. There was something on his mind, that was clear. He just didn’t know what it was.
It was then he tried connecting them with the start of the year, with the feeling of something beginning. Though in general a level-headed man, David was sometimes surprised to find himself prey to rather New Age notions. Perhaps this year, this 2004, was trying to tell him something. Maybe some celestial timepiece, some combination of shadow and planetary sphere, had reached its predetermined mark. Perhaps 2004 was the year of…
He couldn’t make the thought go anywhere, and soon zoned out into watching the television screen. It showed a crazy-haired old gent tramping around an undistinguished patch of countryside. He couldn’t remember selecting the channel, and with the sound off, it really wasn’t very interesting. Was it worth turning the sound up? Probably not. It increasingly seemed to him that television was being created for someone else. He was welcome to watch it, of course, but it was not he the creators had in mind.
As he left the room he passed one of the bookcases, and paused a moment when a book caught his eye. He took it down, opened it. It was a first edition of Conjuring and Magic by Robert Houdin, published in 1878, bought some months before at a stall in Covent Garden. He’d told himself it was merely an investment—at fifty pounds for a VG+ copy, it was certainly a bargain—but actually he’d bought it in the hope that going back to the classics might help. In fact, it had yielded no better results than the small handful of cheap paperbacks he’d desultorily acquired over the last few years, since he’d realised that a little magic was something he’d very much like to be able to do. The problem with magic, he’d discovered, was that there was no trick to it. There was practice, and hard work—and the will to put these things into practice. Even buying the little geegaws of the trade didn’t help. All but the most banal still required sleight of hand, which had to be acquired the old-fashioned way. If you learned how a trick worked, all you actually gained was confirmation that it required a skill you didn’t have and lacked the time and energy to acquire. Learning how a trick worked was the same as being told you couldn’t do it. You gained nothing, and lost everything.
He flicked through the book for a few moments, admiring the old illustrations of palming techniques, and then put the volume back on the shelf. It wasn’t worth even trying tonight. Maybe tomorrow.
Instead he went into the kitchen and ate half a jar of olives while he waited for the kettle to boil.
He dreamed a few more times in March, but remained unable to take anything from them. All he was left with the next morning was absence and the unnameable smell of open water. An absence, too, was what he felt during most of the last weekend of the month, which they spent down in Cornwall. It was the third time they’d taken a romantic mini-break in Padstow. Both previous occasions had been great successes. They’d walked along the craggy coast, bought a couple of little paintings which now graced the bathroom, enjoyed a superlative dinner in Rick Stein’s restaurant (having taken efficient care to book ahead). Good, clean, adult fun. This time David couldn’t seem to get into it. They did the same things, but it wasn’t the same, and it wasn’t merely the repetition that made the difference. Amanda was in good form, braced by the wind and the sky. To him they seemed merely there. In some way it all reminded him of an experience he’d had a couple of weeks previously, during a meeting at work. A creative powwow, with, as it happened, the clients with the potato-headed boss. There had come a point when David found himself talking. He had been doing so for a little while, he realised, and knew he could keep going for as long as he wanted. The other people around the table were either his employees or clients gathered to take advantage of his keen design brain, his proven insights into the deep mysteries of corporate identity. Their eyes were all on him. This didn’t frighten him, merely made him wonder if they were in fact listening, or rather gazing at him and wondering who he was, and what he was talking about. They were all nodding in the right places, so this seemed unlikely. Presumably it was only David, therefore, who was wondering these things. And wondering too whether it was ever worth speaking, if no-one wanted you to stop.
On the second evening in Padstow they paid their tribute to the god of seafood. Amanda seemed happy, perky in a new Karen Millen and smelling faintly of expensively complimentary shampoos and unguents. David knew that it was remarkable that a woman of thirty-seven should look so good in fashion tailored for the young and slim, and was glad. Not delighted—becau
se, to be honest, he had grown accustomed to Amanda looking good—but glad. The food was predictably excellent. David ate it. Amanda ate it. They talked of things in the news and in the papers. They were benignly tolerant of the next table, which featured two well-behaved but voluble children. Neither had anything against children. They didn’t have any because it had been discussed, seven or eight years before, when David was launching the business and Amanda had just switched companies and embarked on the route to her current exalted position in publishing. At the time it would have been a mistake to complicate their lives, or might have been a mistake. It was then still more or less appropriate, too, for Amanda to make that amusing joke about not needing children just yet, because she was married to one. David did little to sustain this idea now barring an occasional hangover and a once-in-a-while good-humoured boisterousness, but having children wasn’t something they discussed at the moment. Maybe later.
They went back to their room after dinner and made love. This was nice, if a little self-conscious and laden with implicit self-congratulation. They’d still got it, still knew how to have a good time. That much was clear.
In the middle of the night David awoke. Amanda was sound asleep beside him, and remained so for the two hours he spent lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling. This time he’d brought something more back with him than an atmosphere. An image of long grasses near somewhere watery. Of somewhere not close, but not far away.
A sense that this was not the beginning of something after all.
By the second week of April he was waking almost once a night to find himself lying in a strange bed. Familiarity closed in rapidly, but for a moment there was a sense of inexplicability, like moving on from the missing [4] to the comfort of the present [5]. He could remember things about the dreams now. Very small things. The long grasses, often, though sometimes they seemed more like reeds. The sense of water: not moving fast, not a river or stream, but present nonetheless.
Finally, a building, or the remains of one.
He knew it was a building, and that it was ruined, though in the dream his point of view was too close up to make out anything more than lichened stone and clouded blue sky above. As if he was crouched down low, and glancing up.
That morning Amanda looked at him over her cup of mint tea. ‘Where did all those olives go?’
‘I ate them,’ he said.
She raised an eyebrow. ‘Are you sleeping okay?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘You don’t seem to be. You look tired. And sometimes you thrash about. The other night I thought I heard you say “Goodbye, love” in your sleep.’
‘“Goodbye, love”? That doesn’t sound like me.’
‘Quite.’
He shrugged. He knew he should tell her about what was happening. He hated films in which a character keeps secrets from the very people or person who should be on his side: a source of cheap tension that had more to do with padding the plot than representing real life. But he didn’t tell her, all the same. It didn’t seem relevant. Or she didn’t, perhaps.
He went to work, and came home, and went to work again. He went to the gym, as usual: moving weights nowhere, running the same rolling yard, strutting and fretting his half hour on the elliptical trainer. Artful Bodgers won more business, and he gave everyone a little bonus. He considered taking over one of their suppliers, then shelved the decision for another day. He came home, he went to work again. He dreamed of the building once more, this time from a little further away. The fact it was ruined was clearly apparent. And that it was somewhere in England. There was nothing about it that proved that. He simply knew it.
You spoke in your sleep again,’ Amanda said, at another breakfast. ‘You said “I can’t hear what you’re saying”.’
He looked at her. ‘But what does that mean?’
She turned a page in this morning’s manuscript. ‘You tell me,’ she said. ‘God, this novel’s shite.’
He started visiting bookstores in his lunch breaks, and stopping into Borders on his way home from work. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, so he just browsed. He looked in the travel sections (domestic); he looked at books on the English countryside. Nothing seemed to help. He didn’t have enough to work with, and there was a sense, when he looked at pictures, that he shouldn’t need to. Whatever this was, it wasn’t a puzzle. It wasn’t supposed to be hard.
In the last week of April, now only a week from his birthday, Amanda sometimes worked in her study with her door shut. He knew that she would be wrapping little presents for him. He knew that they would be nice. He had no desire to know what they were yet. He liked surprises. They came along seldom enough.
Amanda surprised him in another way, before the day. She asked if he was going to visit his mother. He realised both that he should, and that he should do it on the day itself. Without her, after all, there wouldn’t be forty years to mark. He called her, and arranged it. She said she’d put on a little lunch.
He was dreaming now, almost constantly, but through a veil. He felt sick some mornings, as if he had failed to digest something. Nothing he looked at seemed to be what he should be seeing. None of his lists had anything on them except numerals in brackets.
He finally mentioned this to Amanda. She kissed him, and put her arms around him. She was his wife. She understood, or thought she did.
He got up at the usual time on the 4th of May, though he had taken the day off work. He had breakfast in bed, then came down in a dressing gown to a kitchen table on which his presents had been laid. They were all very nice, and Amanda left for work fifteen minutes later than usual. She sat with him, and had an extra cup of tea, and they smiled and laughed.
After she’d gone he showered and dressed and went out and got in his car. He forged a route out of London and onto the M11, taking it up past Cambridge and into the countryside. He tried to find something on the radio to listen to, some CD in the glove compartment, but none of them sounded right. He could remember buying them, but none of them seemed to be his.
He reached Willingham a little before mid-day, on time. His mother was standing at the door to her house, steel-haired, compact and smiling. Once the land on which she stood had been part of a farm, a larger holding belonging to one of her ancestors. Like everything else, it had been made smaller by time.
His mother had made sandwiches and cake. While she laid them out he wandered around the house where he had grown up, trying to remember how long it had been since he’d visited. A couple of years, certainly. She occasionally made it down to London, and that tended to be where they met. Tea at the Ritz, sometimes. An overnight or two in the house he owned with Amanda, tucked up safe in the spare bed. Not so very often, for the person who had been his mother, but that tended to be the way it went. You moved further from the start, and towards something else: eyes turned always forward, the past something you only remembered once in a while, generally through something heard. Things weren’t about beginnings any more. They were about persistence, and endings, for the most part. Persistence, above all.
He found himself drawn to one room in particular. His parents’ old room; his mother’s still. He stood in the centre, unsure of what he was doing there. He looked up at the ceiling. Off-white, as it always had been. If you allowed your eyes to fall out of focus then the imperfections blurred away, and its colour became all you could see.
His mother’s voice floated upstairs.
After lunch he asked her about her bedroom. Had something changed? She said no. Nothing had changed for her in several years.
He shrugged, took a risk: told her how he’d felt compelled to stand in there. She was a woman. She’d understand.
She did, and perhaps more than he’d expected. More than he did. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘It’s your birthday.’
He shook his head, not comprehending. She smiled, as if it were self-evident. ‘That’s where it happened, up there in that room. That’s where you were born,’ she said, and then winked. �
�You can live down in that London all you like,’ she added, ‘But this is where you’re from.’
He barely heard anything else she said, and left twenty minutes later. When he reached the end of the village, he did not take the left turn which would lead to the A road and later back to the M11. Instead he turned right, and kept driving.
He drove for an hour, out into the countryside, out beyond the villages and into the country proper, to where the fens began. To the place where water became as much as part of the world as earth, to where grass and reeds and flatness were all the land had to say.
After a while he turned again, not back on himself, but at an angle, and headed in a different direction. A little later, he did so once more.
More Tomorrow: And Other Stories Page 16