Dreamside (19 page)

TWO

"Ditto, ditto!" cried Tweedledee
—Lewis Carroll

Honora Brennan, still recovering
from Ella's unexpected visit, is
frightened. She
wanders round the house drinking from a glass of stout and swallowing
temazepam. In her back room she stands before the covered easel and removes the
tablecloth.

Sitting
back on a high stool, she contemplates her work, squinting at it through the
soft-focus lens of alcohol and tranquilizers which gives the painting a fluid
quality all of its own. The canvas shows a familiar scene: a sturdy, spreading
oak leaning out across a lake that seems to have no farther shore. But the view
is changed in some way, as if Honora has painted a different dreamside, one in
the grip of a new authority, which leaves even her guessing.

Honora
covers up the painting before the answer comes to her. She climbs the stairs to
bed.
The hinge on the gate outside whines and she glances
down into the street.
A child has climbed on to her gate and is swinging
on it, gently back and forth: a girl, a little older than those she teaches at
school, neglected, wearing a cut-down dress from a fashion at least a decade
past, with lank hair framing sad eyes. The girl looks up at her. Honora draws
the curtains.

Curled
up in the dark, Honora wishes that Ella had stayed longer. Maybe she
would
go
to England, and spend some time with Ella. Her visit has turned up buried
secrets, memories that sit up and point at her like corpses out of coffins; but
it has also brought the warm companionship they enjoyed in the early days on
dreamside.

Honora
spends half the night drifting between waking, sleeping and dreaming. She is
shaken by the wind rattling the window. Ella, Lee, Brad, Professor Burns and
countless other voices all take turns at owning the hand that rattles the
window, until in exasperation she gets out of bed.
Taking a
school copy of the prayer book from her bookshelf she levers open the staples
that bind it, carefully folding the leaves into paper wedges and forcing them
between the gaps of the window frame.
She climbs into bed and drifts
back into sleep.

The
familiar branches of the giant oak loom large, as if from out of a mist,
swaying gently and beckoning her on; she's carried in by the currents. She just
goes with it, not part of it but with it, that's all it ever took, all it ever
wanted, without struggle or without any more need to help it along, until,
breaking into substance like the gentle breaking of an insignificant wave upon
a beach it is delivered to you or you to it.

But
this is not the same dreamside. The oak is dead, the willow a cluster of bony
twigs in ugly gestures; the trampled grass a crust of hard frost; and the lake
itself a solid, frozen feet-thick sheet of ice.

This
is the dreamside that Honora has been visiting these last twelve months,
searching for something she doesn't understand. She patrols the lakeside
looking out across the frozen water for signs that never come. She walks clear
out onto the frozen lake about twenty, thirty yards. Her boot scrapes the
sprinkled layer of snow: the ice underneath is a grey paste with impenetrable
darkness immediately beneath it.

Then,
as before, she hears the dull thump of an explosion under the ice:
dooomphh
way
out from the shore; a thud, maybe, of ice shifting and resettling. There it
goes again,
doooomphh,
only nearer this time. Honora is spooked by the
sound, even though she's heard it before a thousand times.

For
the first time (every time she comes it's for the first time) Honora sees
hairline cracks in the ice, though
it's
feet thick
with no sign of a thaw. She sees more shadowy movements beneath the ice, strange
shapes forming and reforming, something live. DOOOOOMMPH! There goes that noise
again, much closer this time, and she feels the ice shiver beneath her. What
thing is under the ice, thrashing around, trying to get out?

Honora
bends down to take a closer look then— DOOOOOMMPH!!—that thudding explosion
happens right under her feet and this time she feels the ice shaking beneath
her and is almost thrown off balance. She sees a large crack opening up and
zigzagging towards her, passing between her legs, racing towards the shore. Now
the crack is opening up wide and Honora begins to run, slipping as she goes,
her legs becoming paralyzed as she tries to escape the opening ice behind her.
Her running slows. Her muscles freeze. The ice is locking in to her. She is
becoming ice herself. Only by a monumental effort of will is she able to throw
herself on to the shore, and out of the dream.

She wakes up in a
temazepam-and-stout-induced sweat, wishing for someone to hold, to speak to,
the someone
she denies herself by way of self-punishment.
She even contemplates phoning Ella and making a clean breast of it. She picks
up the clock. It's 4:40 A.M. Maybe she will go over to England, to see if Ella
and Lee can help her with this madness. She sinks back down on to the pillow,
hoping for unviolated sleep, clean in the knowledge that the dream, like the
little girl swinging on the gate, won't call on her in the same night twice.

THREE

In
the dreamer's dream, the dreamed one
awoke
 
—
Jorge Luis
Borges

Nothing has been said exactly,
but Ella stays at Lee's. Both think
leave it, wait and
see,
bad luck to use words on it. They sleep together,
curled up like two question marks, one sleeping body cupping the other,
resisting the dream.

Lee
goes back to his office where he tries to work, struggling against exhaustion
and fear. Ella waits at home, reading paperbacks and doing uncharacteristically
wifely things: cleaning, shopping, cooking dinner and giving him a neck rub
when he gets back from work. In return, Lee fixes the roof of the car.

Then, one night, their
resistance collapses and they find each other on dreamside. The dream is lucid
and with the same feverish excitement as at any time before, but they wrap
their arms about each other's waists as if the other might dissolve at any
moment. They stare around in horror at their idyll: the charred branches, the
barren soil, the icy lake . . .

There is
nothing to say in the face of this sterility, and immediately the dream
breaks.

"What
happened?" they ask, waking. They have always regarded dreamside as a
private island and a personal haven, despite the menace that shadowed their
later dreaming. It has always been held to be a place beyond change. "But
what happened?"

That morning, Ella got
a call from
Honora,
She had decided to spend Easter
with them. She had booked a flight from Belfast to Birmingham. Ella was to
drive to the airport and collect her.

Honora
was shy with Lee when they returned. "Twelve years? Can it really be
twelve years?"

"Nearly thirteen.
You look great," said Lee. She didn't. Honora
looked pale and her blue veins stood out too prominently on her forehead and
hands. Her eyes lacked sheen.

Of course it's her, he thought, just look at her.

They talked
the evening away, without mentioning the dreaming. The subject itched to be
scratched, but Ella was patient. She knew that Honora had come to tell her
something, and she waited for the moment to be right.

That moment
came the next day. Ella had arranged to take Honora for a drive, anything to
distract from the burden of anticipation. In the morning they drove to Warwick
Castle, and crept giggling around the dungeons and waxworks. In the afternoon
they visited Coventry cathedral, where the giant new building stands shoulder
to shoulder with the war-blitzed shell of the medieval Gothic version. Inside
the ruin, Honora turned to face the altar with its cross of charred beams.

"I had
it," she said. "You knew, didn't you?"

"The
baby miscarried. You lost the baby."

Honora
turned to face her. "I lost the baby. I also had the baby."

"What
are you talking about, Honora?"

"I had
the baby and I didn't have the baby. You still don't understand? Do you need
me to spell it out for you?"

"Maybe
I do. Maybe I'm not as clever as you think."

They stood
facing each other, Ella searching Honora's disappointed eyes until suddenly,
she understood.

"On
dreamside?"

Honora
didn't flicker.

"You
had it on
dreamside?
It couldn't be!" Ella suddenly felt out of her
depth. She was first to look away.

"Are
you sure it wasn't
. ..
"

"Wasn't
what?
A dream?"

Ella took
the other woman's arm. "Let's go. I need to sit down somewhere and think
about this."

They walked
across the hollowed-out shell of the old cathedral, down the steps and out
across the face of the defiant new monument. They found a bench. Honora stared
downwards.

Have it? How can you have it and not have it? But that's
how it was.

"It
was November.
Cold November.
Ma and Da thought I was
going mad. Maybe I was ... I remember everything. Mostly I remember how cold it
was.
Bitter winds and mists rolling down from the loughs.
Rain.
All that.

"It
was my barren year.
My lost year.
After I'd tried to
kill myself at university, I was just idle. I
felt.
.
. cauterized.
All nerves gone.
Spring and summer
slipped into autumn and I didn't even notice. Ma and Da fussing over me the
whole time, I had to shut them out to stay sane. There was a weekly appointment
with a psychologist.
A nice man.
I told him everything
about myself. I opened up to him like a flower, told him all about my
childhood, all that stuff. And in all the candour he didn't see I'd kept this
other thing quiet."

"You
didn't tell him about dreamside?"

"Not a
thing."

"Didn't
he guess you were hiding something?"

"I
don't know. I kept him busy with masses and masses of information about other
things. It just came pouring out. It seemed to keep him satisfied. But the more
I talked, the more I kept it a secret, the more I could feel it swelling inside
me. I knew I had an appointment on dreamside. It was inflating me, insisting,
summoning
me.

"I
stopped fighting it, and then one night I was back there. You know, it's funny:
it was always
night,
and I couldn't change it. And the
moon was always full, and on dreamside I had this huge, soft, roundness growing
inside me. It was all different.
A cold place.
Frost,
and moon washed nights, and trees all silhouette. And
the lake was calm, like oil.

"I was
terrified, Ella. Every time I was drawn back there, I was bigger. I tried to
hold it off. Have you ever tried to stay awake, days at a time? Try it. You
start to break up. First there are little slips, with your words faltering and
fusing together. Then there's all the dithering, unable to perform simple
tasks. And you lose concentration, you're 'away' somewhere else; and then you
start to laugh at yourself, but with hysterical laughter that cuts back at you.
You forget why you're trying to stay awake. So that's what you do, fight it,
fight
it. In the end, of course, you give in.

"Then
I arrived there with the awful realization, you know, this is the time, this is
the moment. It was so cold there. And there was something else ... a shadow ...
a bad echo. The trees were ugly charcoal silhouettes and the moon was like a
gob of candle wax dribbled across the lake. I was thinking I would rather be
anywhere but here when I felt the first contraction. It was like a shock wave.
Instinct took over, and I looked for somewhere to crouch. I went over to the
oak. I couldn't get this idea out of my head that I was like an animal, looking
at the moon; like a she-wolf about to whelp.

"I
thought about my body, sleeping in my bedroom. But what was the point? I
couldn't stop it. Hours seemed to pass. There was no light, no dawn.
Only pain.
Loneliness and pain.
Then the waters broke. I grabbed hold of my knees and held my breath. The contractions
came every two minutes.

"I
leaned back on my hands and I could feel the baby's head, pushing, pushing. I
was delirious, I thought the dream would have to break: no, it's impossible, it
won't come, there's really nothing to come, but then there it was.
Red-hot iron searing at my insides.
I was shivering with
fear or pain or cold. I couldn't stop shivering.
Then when I
pushed the baby's head shot out.
I was biting the air for breath.

"The
rest of the baby came in a slippery, blubbery heap. I knew I was weeping and
gulping and shivering, but I did everything on instinct. I cleared out its
mouth with my finger and then it gulped at the air and began to cry. I was
actually holding the baby in my hands. Then I laid the baby on the ground, bit
the cord and knotted it as if I'd done it a hundred times. I took the baby and
walked into the lake, up to my knees. It was very cold. I washed the baby
clean, and then I washed myself.