Dreamside (18 page)

Problems
were compounded when Brad "confessed" to Lee that he and Ella had, on
occasion, successfully conducted their own dreamtime rendezvous. Lee was
genuinely shocked. It had never occurred to him that other dreamtime activities
might have been going on in his absence.

"It's a lie," Ella protested,
"and it's ridiculous."

"Maybe that's what he meant when he
called you jealous."

"I
don't believe I'm hearing this! You take in any lie that ape comes out with,
and you don't believe a word I say! How can you do that to me?"

Lee
let the idea niggle him. Ella was livid. They argued, ridiculously and
histrionically, but most of all badly. After that they didn't see each other
for over a week.

Lee
made the first conciliatory move, driven by some news he had heard in the union
bar.

"She
did what?" Ella went white.

"She
took a load of pills. They had to pump her stomach."

"Oh God!
Can we go and see her?"

"Apparently
she's already gone home."

"What?
Ireland home?"

"Yes,
Ireland home."

"When
did all this happen?"

"Four or five days ago."

"But what about her course?
Her exams?"
Lee only
shrugged. "Why did I know that something like this was going to happen? We
never paid enough attention to her. We were too wrapped up in ourselves."

"Yes."

Ella
sat down and began to roll a cigarette. "Please stay with me
tonight," she said, without looking up. "I get frightened at night
and I'm having bad dreams."

Lee
nodded. "You know I want to stay with you."

They
made friends again, and made love again. The news about Honora made them
vulnerable, and for a while they were gentle with each other.

The
day after Lee broke the news, Ella got Honora's home telephone number from the
university registrar. Honora's father answered, asked who it was and went to
fetch his daughter. He came back on the line to tell her that Honora wasn't
well enough to come to the phone, but that she was much better and thank you
for calling.

Lee,
on going to find out how much Brad knew, discovered that he had cleared out of
his bed-sit without notice. It had been some time since he had turned in for a
lecture, and none of his fellow medical students had seen him in weeks. Lee got
Brad's landlady to unlock the door of his room. She stood over him, shaking her
keys and listing complaints against student tenants while he inspected the
abandoned room. There were a number of medical reference books and a shelf full
of sci-fi paperbacks; a battered mono record player and a handful of scratched
and sleeveless albums; an oil-fired roadwork lantern, a police bollard and the
amber dome from a Belisha beacon, plus other trophies and street paraphernalia
which for some
 
reason he felt happy to keep in his room; and a few
clothes, though all the decent stuff had gone along with his suitcase and bags.
There was nothing there he wasn't better off without. Lee told the landlady
differently, but he knew for certain that Brad wouldn't be coming back.

With
two of them gone, it didn't come as a complete surprise to Lee, when, towards
the end of the spring term, a pink handwritten envelope appeared in his room
one morning. It had been shoved under the door sometime during the small hours:

Dear
Lee, I still love you but I've got to get my head straightened out. Remember
that holiday we planned for the Greeks
Islands,
before every thing got heavy? That's where I'm
going, I don't know for
how long. Maybe I will
come
back\ after that and finish my degree, though it's pointless
at
the moment
—/
haven't done a stroke
of work since I met you and we got mixed up in the dreaming. I haven't
got the guts to face you with this, which is why
the letter. You're a good man and there will never be any forgetting
the
things we have done but I've got to get out of it. I'm crying while I'm writing
this. I meant that about still
loving you.
Finish your studies, at least one of us should.
Ella

Though it was
half-expected, Lee was devastated. The four of them had been isolated from the
rest of the university, and now he was left completely alone. Honora had been
carried out on a stretcher; Brad had bolted; and now Ella had run away to hide.
It was exactly a year since he and Ella had come together. He knew he would
never get over her.

Like a good boy he
stayed at the university and completed his studies. From the end of that term
he lived like a monk, got his head down and caught up on a year's neglected
reading. He worked hard and was awarded a respectable but undistinguished degree.

He didn't expect to see
the others again. Three postcards from Ella arrived in the first couple of
months. They showed pictures of brilliantly whitewashed houses against an
improbably blue sky, classical temples and definitive Mediterranean sunsets. On
their reverse sides were tightly written, difficult-to-read messages with
excited descriptions and introspective diversions, all thoroughly impersonal.
But Lee kept the postcards and pinned them on his wall close to his pillow as
if they would act as a charm against bad dreams and a remedy for spoiled
memories. No more arrived.

P A R
T
 
T
H R E
E

March 1986

O N E

Crito, we owe a cock to Aesculapius. Please

pay
it,

and
don't let it pass

—Socrates

"I dreamt it."

"It doesn't seem possible."

"But there it is."

Ella
and Honora, heads together, huddle in secrecy in the panelled snug of
Belfast's Crown, sipping creamy black stout that left thin white moustaches of
foam on their upper lips.

"But he was never in your bed, or
close to it?"

"Ella,
I was dreaming, but I wasn't drunk. I wasn't interested in him. Apart from that
dreamthing Brad never got near enough, and neither did anyone else. If it had
been
Lee
things could have been different."

"I always knew that you had
something for each other."

"I
could never have stolen him away from you Ella. He was starry-eyed."

"But this thing with Brad; it was rape."

"Yes. At least
that's what I thought then, and for a long time afterwards. But he said I could
have stopped it if I'd wanted. It was a mind thing, and I let it happen. I've
thought about it a lot since. I don't know if he's right."

"But you were
paralyzed; he was stronger and he took advantage. It's no different from the
real thing."

"It might as well have been the real thing."

"That's the part that doesn't seem
possible."

"You
see! Even you doubt me! You've had experience of dreaming, you've been there.
You know how it is—but you can't bring yourself to believe that I got pregnant
because of something that happened on dreamside. Maybe she was drunk, maybe she
can't remember, maybe she just doesn't want to admit it, I've had plenty of
time to try them all on. How could I expect anyone else to accept this, if you
of all people can't see
it?"

"Honora,
I do believe you; I have to believe you. Like you said, I've got some
experience of this, but even for me it seems like a long time ago and sometimes
I don't even know how much of it was true."

"It
was all true, all right. The pregnancy was confirmed, absolutely. No question
of error."

"But
you lost the baby? It miscarried? Was that before or after you took an
overdose?"

"After.
It was the pregnancy that made me do it. I was going mad. You don't know what
it was like. I thought I might have the baby; then I thought it might be born
with two heads or not even human at all.
And me a good
Catholic girl.
At least, I was then. Anyway, the suicide attempt
induced the miscarriage. It was finished."

Ella put a hand on Honora's.

"You'd
best be moving if you really want to catch that ferry. Will you let me know
what Lee found out about you-know-who? Though I'll tell you something Ella, I
didn't have a bad dream or a
repeater
while you were here. Maybe they've
stopped again after all. God help us, I hope so."

"I
hope so too Honora.
Now, no more grieving about lost babies,
OK?
Promise?"

"No
more grieving. I mean, if she were out there now, she'd forgive me, wouldn't
she?"

"Just
try not to think about it."

"Right.
No more grieving."

"You'll
come over to England and see us?"

"I'll
try."

"I
don't want try, I want promise."

"Perhaps when I get a few days' holiday . . .
Easter."

"Easter.
That's a promise and
I'll
keep you to it."

Outside
the Crown they walked to the car park and
kissed,
something they would never have done in student days. Age softens as much as it
hardens, thought Ella. She got into her Midget and raced back.

She
arrived at Lee's cottage before midnight. He had heard the car and was standing
silhouetted in the doorway. The hall was spiced with the smell of the curry
which simmered on the stove, a hint of whiskey on Lee as Ella squeezed his hand
and went by him into the lounge.

He
poured strong drinks and served up the curry. They caught up in shorthand,
then
finished the meal in silence. Ella took her glass and
sat on the floor in front of the open fire while Lee massaged her aching
shoulders. The fire sparked and flickered hypnotically.

"So
it could be him?" Ella said lazily.

"It
could be; he's fallen into a well. I never got near enough to second-guess him.
It wasn't the fond reunion. He's been that way so long his face has gone
whiskey coloured."

"But
he's had
the dreams?"

"Oh,
he's had
the dreams
all right; there was a very scared Brad inside that
alcohol. He made a little speech about unwanted visitors, but I didn't know
whether he was talking about me or the dreams."

"But
is he bringing them on? Has he been back there?"

"That's
the question. Whatever it is, he seems to think that they've started to get up
and walk. He kept staring out of his window at the empty cottage next door.
Looking for enemies.”

"What
did your instincts say?"

"Too frightened.
What about her?"

"She
was definitely holding out on me. I'm sure it's her. She gave me as much of the
story as she thought would keep me satisfied.
Rationed it out,
right up until the end.
But there's more, I'm sure of it."

"So
it's Honora."

"I
could be wrong."

"It's
all we've got to go on. So how was the journey?"

"I
had some bad feelings on the way over. Then when I got to Ireland it was OK.
Honora was warm after she'd recovered from the shock of seeing me. It brought a
lot of things back."

"Me too.
Seeing Brad, even in that state."

"It
brought back things about us, too."

"All
of it?"

"Everything."

Lee
kissed Ella's neck. "I never really figured why or how it ended."

"Well,"
Ella smiled, "we never really forgave each other for being only
human."

"One
day you were gone, then there were three postcards, and then thirteen years had
passed."

"The postcards!
I remember trying to fill them with anything but what
really mattered."

They
lapsed into silence. Ella felt Lee's loneliness dangerously close to the
surface.

"You
were never out of my mind.
All the years."

"Stop
talking about it. Come here. We can make the years fall away." She smiled
again, and put her hand inside his shirt. "Do you remember a certain game
we used to play?"

"Of
course I remember”.

Ella
pulled him down on to the rug and they made love. It was clean, hungry sex.
They pretended nothing had changed, that they were back in Ella's scented cave
and that the amber light from the fire was the dawn breaking through the heavy
curtains of their old world. They could be childlike again. They could pretend
to be victims of a fold in the ordinary sequence of time, with the intervening
thirteen years as a long cold night. Pretending was good, and each could
pretend as well as the other, and the game of pretending didn't devour the way
that dreaming devoured.