Dream Guy (32 page)

Then he remembered what he had done to Nell and his innards shriveled like a slug on the receiving end of a shower of salt. He had to get home and discover how to fetch her from nowhere, from nothing.

Back in his room, he checked
Dream Master
again. It was even harder to read about rejecting Nell. In the boat, he had turned away, but here, looking at the images of her, he could not mistake the appeal in her eyes. He shut the book, sat at his drawing table and sketched her over and over again, wishing he had taken a photo from her room so that he could be sure of the details of her face. He did not want to look at the book again, but it did have other pictures of Nell. The only thing it didn’t have was her actual death in the bus stop. That hadn’t been a dream.

By the time he looked at the clock and saw he should have gone to bed two hours before, he had filled sheets of paper from which Nell gazed ironically, irritably, peacefully, cynically, happily. Every time he remembered another expression, he had drawn another picture, cramming the pages with hundreds of angles of her face.

He shoved them under his pillow and went to bed, convinced that it would not be as simple as this to bring her back. His assumption proved correct. When he went down for breakfast, his mother was in her dressing gown, finishing her toast.

“Why aren’t you at work, Mum?”

“I’ve taken the rest of this week off. I don’t care that much about the car. Well, I do care about the car, but what with Nell and the car, I just don’t feel easy being away from you lot. Bad things happen in threes. If anything else is going to happen, I want to know about it immediately, not hear about it over the phone or when I walk through the door at the end of the day.” She took her dishes to the sink and asked if Joe wanted anything.

“It’s okay. I’ll make it.”

The phone rang. Joe was so hungry that he barely registered what his mother was saying. He did notice that she’d put on her soothing voice, the one she used when clients at the end of their tether had winkled her home phone number out of the receptionist and were determined to list every flaw of the spouse they so wanted to ditch, despite knowing that this was billable time. He’d finished his second bowl of cereal by the time she put the phone down. She reached for a tissue, blew her nose with ferocity and dabbed away the traces of tears.

“That was Niamh Brennan. She was just telling me that Nell’s body is being released to the undertaker today, so she’s going ahead with plans for a funeral on Saturday.”

“Nell’s still dead?” blurted Joe.

His mother hugged him. “Oh, sweetheart, did you think you’d wake up and everything would be all right?”

“No.” He submitted to his mother’s embrace for a moment, then shook her off. “I don’t know why. I’d just sort of hoped. Stupid, I know.”

He wanted to pummel himself for his stupidity. He’d drawn Nell, but he hadn’t actually dreamed about her. The drawings were not enough, no matter how masterful he’d become. It was frustrating. He had until Saturday to recover her. Once Nell was buried, it would be too late to get her back from anywhere, let alone nowhere.

But for the first time since that first fishy dream, Joe hit a wall. He could not dream. He spent all Tuesday trying to dream of anything at all, but every time he nodded off, there was nothing—just blank, dark emptiness.

He went to bed early, straight after supper. Ben and Liesel exchanged weirded-out looks. Still nothing happened. He plunged into sleep and stayed there, eclipsed by exhaustion. When he surfaced on Wednesday morning, it was nearly midday. He got up, sloped downstairs where he found his mother sitting at the computer. He had a go at her.

“Why didn’t you wake me up? I’ve wasted the whole morning. You should have woken me up. You’re always hassling me to get up, and the one time I want to get up, you leave me in bed until the whole bloody day has gone.”

Mrs. Knightley was startled by Joe’s vehement outburst. “You need to rest, Joe. The psychiatrist told us you might sleep more than normal. Do you remember? It’s a reaction to shock. It’s not unusual. Anyway, why do you want to get up? You don’t have school. You don’t have any work, because I made it quite clear to Mrs. Elphick that you can catch up with coursework when you get back to school and not before. So where’s the fire?”

Joe agreed there was no fire. He went back to bed.

This time he stayed in the dark. He reached out and touched it. He found he could grasp it. It felt velvety and emollient on his skin. Cool. Soothing. He pictured himself surrounded by the dark. When he was smaller, he’d gone to a party where the going-home present was a rubber ball with a little plastic figure suspended inside. Some kids had dinosaurs, others had cars or fish. He’d been given a shark. He imagined himself like that shark, in a rubber ball of darkness, bouncing around a huge, light space. He gazed at the trajectory the shrinking ball of blackness was making, smacking against the whiteness like a squash ball against the walls of a squash court. Finally, he managed to suck the blackness deep within himself and now he was standing within the great vacuum, and still it was blank.

He concentrated harder and steadily created a door in the wall opposite him.

It opened into a narrow alley, running between two immense stone buildings and topped by a sliver of distant night sky, occasional stars dotting the way like the strip of guide lights running down an airplane aisle.

He felt his way down the passage. At times he could touch both walls, then one of the buildings would retreat a little and he was left tracking the right-hand side of the passage.

There was no sodium glow of streetlights. He could feel himself descending, but the buildings on either side did not seem to get any higher. On and on he walked, increasingly uneasy. He looked back and immediately behind him found the doorway he had come through, although it should have been hundreds of meters behind him by now. More disquieting still, there was no handle, no means of retreating through it. As he walked farther into the darkness, he felt like a letter on a page along which the cursor was traveling in delete mode.

Then he heard the panting. Some distance away, several dogs were huffing and puffing. They sounded pleased, as if they had done good work for their master, reminding Joe of the dogs that had accompanied the hunt. One bayed, its howl reverberating along the passageway, sending shivers up Joe’s spine. He half expected a mad, red-eyed slavering monster to bound toward him. There was the sound of paws bouncing about, claws clicking against some solid surface. Joe kept on walking. But as the sound faded, he grew impatient, no longer content to remain in the dark. Once again, he was in a section of path where he could touch both walls at the same time. He stood, stretched out into a star shape and began pushing the walls apart. His body elongated, his arms and legs grew in length and size, and the walls slowly began to ease away from each other. He turned to the right-hand wall and leaned hard against it until it folded into itself, then repeated the action with the left-hand wall. Before him now was a huge expanse of night sky, like being in a planetarium. But there was nothing else there. Once again, the dogs started up, panting and snuffling for some scent. Then he saw it. It wasn’t very dignified, but it was large and it had three heads, which was why it made so much noise.

One head was mastiff-like, majestic, heavy and drooling. The second belonged to a more elegant hound, an Afghan or saluki with a neat snout and eyebrows that looked bemused. The final head belonged to a Doberman, teeth bared and eyes cruel. As Joe approached, all three heads snapped up. There was teeth baring and growling. Joe stopped to look at the creature. It resembled a radioactive mutation, but it was there, and it was nearly a meter high at the shoulders. The very substantial shoulders needed to hold up and govern three different heads.

The dog attacked. Joe created an impenetrable barrier of air and it—or they, he was not sure which—became more and more wound up, frenziedly barking and leaping up and down, jaws agape. He manipulated the air around it, encircling the beast in a sphere in which it ran and tumbled like clothes in a dryer.

A crescent moon rose and lit a courtyard surrounded on three sides by classical temples, colonnaded, decorated with marble friezes, caryatids and balustrades with tiled roofs. The courtyard was paved with marble tiles and in its center where one might expect a fountain was a chaise longue of gilded wood and wine-dark velvet. On it reclined a woman wearing a dress of the same wine-colored velvet. She lay on her back, one leg swinging off the edge of the chaise longue, her head pillowed on her folded arms. Her feet were bare and her hair was swept back from her face.

It was Nell.

Joe ran to her side. He checked her neck. The skin was unbroken and unblemished. He could discern no breath, no rise and fall of the chest, none of the twitches or shifts of sleep. But she was solid and real. He leaned forward and kissed her. Her lips were still and cold.

He stood again and readied himself to carry her out of this place. He gathered her to him. The dress bunched and nearly tripped him up as he turned, and he was so busy shifting Nell’s weight and collecting up the material that he did not notice that he had been surrounded by a platoon of skeletons. It was the fragility of their bones which first struck Joe. Then he saw they all had their right arms lifted across their chests, as if covering the hearts, which no longer beat beneath their ribs. As he moved toward them, they parted ranks and made a passageway of bones through which he walked. However mild they seemed, they unnerved Joe and he wanted to escape them. With a rattle, they lifted up their arms to form a bridge, and in the distance, he heard children’s voices singing Oranges and Lemons. The sky remained crepuscular as Joe passed the three-headed dog, still trapped in its bubble.

The slope seemed steeper as he went up it. At first, Nell’s weight seemed manageable, but his arms tired and his breath came quicker and quicker. The children’s voices faded away. He leaned against a wall to get his breath back, not daring to put Nell down. The distance he covered between each rest diminished until he was taking only a few steps before halting.

Finally, he absolutely had to put her down. He sat beside her, his elbows resting on his knees, his upper arms burning from the exertion. He looked at her face, and he saw that where her skin had been uniformly white, now there was color in her lips and cheeks, and her eyelashes and eyebrows seemed darker, more clearly defined. There was still no breath. He stood up, clenched his fists then released his fingers as though flicking water off his hands. Then he sculpted the air, creating an opening and found himself in Nell’s room. He picked her up and carried her back into his world.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Back to Reality

As he had planned, the opening he had created led Joe straight into Nell’s bedroom. It was dark and he nearly stumbled and dropped her, but he managed to right himself and lower her onto the bed. He fumbled for the bedside light. To his relief, her chest now rose and fell. She breathed. He knew he ought to leave, but he wanted to look at her. He eased her over toward the wall and lay on one side, his head on his arm, his other arm resting on her diaphragm so he could feel her steady, comforting inhalations and exhalations. He breathed in her leafy scent, like the damp of a warm garden after a rainy night. Even as he told himself he ought to be getting up and going, the ache of his arms and legs and shoulders eased away, leaving only a delicious looseness, like his limbs were liquefying.

When he woke, he was lying on the floor of his own room, still stretched out on his side as though Nell were next to him. It was dark, which meant it could be anywhere between four in the afternoon and eight in the morning. The clock glowed, showing that it was quarter to six in the morning. He climbed back into bed.

* * * *

The next thing he knew, Ben was shaking him awake. “Come on, we’re going to be late. Didn’t you set the alarm last night?”

“Late for what?”

“School, dimwit. School. Remember, where we go every day?”

Joe gazed at Ben as if his brother had grown an extra limb. “But we’re not going to school just now. What about the press? And Mum’s staying at home too.”

“On what planet?” Ben sounded exasperated. Joe saw that Ben believed his lame little brother had lost all grasp of reality. “It’s the middle of term, Joe. We’ve got six more weeks of school before the Christmas holidays.”

“Six? The last time I looked it was only four.” Joe got out of bed and rummaged in his desk. He found his diary. He remembered writing down three major pieces of coursework over the past two weeks, but the diary was blank.

“What day is it, Ben?”

“Wednesday.”

“No, I mean date.”

“The seventh of November.”

“Shit.” This finally galvanized Joe into action, and Ben left him to get ready.

There was just time to check the garage before he left for school. The Lamborghini was lurking there like a docile cat. At school, Smokey was eager as ever to discuss being turned into a fish and Joe’s curious absence from classes the day before. Frustrated by Joe’s stonewalling, Smokey whined, “It’s like you don’t trust me, man.”

He looked Smokey in the eye and said, “Not as far as I can throw you.”

Smokey recoiled as if Joe had slapped him. “What do you mean?”

“Look, Smokey, we’ve got nothing in common. You want to get wasted or laid or both, and I want to get some GCSEs and get out of this place. I like graphic novels, you hate them. You like getting hammered, I hate it. I could carry on, but why bother?”

“You’re so gay.”

“No, that would be my brother,” Joe said evenly.

Smokey stepped back. Until now, Joe had had a sense of humor bypass where his brother was concerned. Normally, Joe would have really lost his rag, but now he seemed mellow. Confident. “What have you been taking? You’re not like you.”

Joe smiled. It was true. He wasn’t like himself, but it didn’t matter. He had been a Dream Master and even if he never had another dream, nothing could take that away.