Dreamside

ONE

There was no forgetting her voice. After more than twelve years, it was Ella Innes.

“Ella! Oh, Ella! I know why you’ve called me. It’s happening isn’t it, it’s all happening again!”

“Hold on Lee; it’ll be OK. Listen, we’ve really got to talk.”

“Yes. Only it’s not OK Ella. I don’t know if I’m awake or if I’m dreaming; or if we’re even having this conversation.”

“You’re awake now. This is real. Remember how I used to wake you? This is just the same, remember.”

Remember. It was a kind of code word. Remember. I remember it all. Your voice. Your scent. How I felt every time you came near me.

“Sure.” But he sounded more than doubtful. “Let me just get my thoughts together will you? It’s been a wicked night.”

“I had to get in touch with you. I couldn’t think of anything else.” He heard her take a deep breath. “I want to come and see you. Today.”

“Today? Where the hell are you anyway?” (Who the hell are you after all this time?)

“I’m living in Cumbria, by the sea. Nice scenery and nuclear seepage. What else do you want to know?”

“But that’s over two hundred and fifty miles away, Ella.”

“We live in a world of cars and motorways, Lee. It’s incredible how easy it is to travel around.”

“OK, no need to be funny with me.” But that was Ella. He thought for a moment before giving her some muddled directions. “All right. I’ll be waiting for you.”

“Do it.” That’s how she always used to talk. Just do it.

“One thing before you go, Ella. How did you track me down? I mean it’s been a long time.”

“Not so difficult. I started at the university and followed a very orthodox career trail.” Old note of criticism, not fair. “Lee? Are you afraid?”

“I had a terrible night, Ella. Yes, I am afraid.”

He put down the phone. It had been twelve going on thirteen years since they had seen or spoken to each other. He stared at the wall, dumbly. His astonishment and dismay conflicted with the acute fear of waking up and finding himself back in bed, which he knew would stay with him all day.

Then he remembered the trick with the book. He took, at random, a paperback volume from the bookshelf. Letting it fall open naturally, he read the first few lines to present themselves:

Glancing away, he squeezed his eyes shut, then looked back at the open page. He was relieved to see that the lines were unchanged. He repeated the exercise. Hoping that it counted for something, he returned the book to the shelf.

When he checked back down the sequence of false awakenings, the most bizarre thing had been Ella’s voice striking out of the past and talking to him as if they had spoken only yesterday. When they had parted in their youth it had not been on bad terms, or at least where there had been pain there had been no anger. Parting had happened by inevitable unspoken contract, for the simple reason that they had come to hold each other’s company in a mutual despair which outweighed even their terror.

Lee inspected his face in the mirror and awarded himself a high slob rating. That man in the mirror, with the lantern jaw and the pouting bottom lip which girls had once found endearing, was now getting jowls. He could do with losing a few pounds. Would Ella be able to see the winsome, athletic, wise-alec twenty-year-old that he had once been?

It didn’t occur to him that Ella herself would have aged. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t thought of her in the decade since she had fled the university, putting two thousand miles and an even greater psychic geography between them; but in his mind she had remained always the same. Unforgettable Ella; delicious, hypnotic, superior, erotic Ella; Ella undressed, Ella with her clothes on. There came, in equal measure, deep tormenting sentimental memories and sharp sexual reminiscences. Ella vibrant with arch cleverness and smouldering undergraduate sexuality.

Memories clung to him like the tentacles of a deep-sea creature; or perhaps that was him, sucking at memories that should have drifted free long ago. But the problem was his. All relationships post-Ella had been held up to her light by way of comparison, and inevitably in those dazzling rays they palled. Scratch the surface of Lee’s feelings for any woman and you would find Ella, impossible to erase or surpass. What could others hope to do, when she ghosted the shores of his memory and seeded his dreams like that?

The only consolation to Lee, if consolation he was looking for, was that he knew that Ella could never get over him. They could live neither with nor without each other.

And now she had contacted him, after nearly thirteen years. He was going to meet her, and he was afraid, just as he knew she too would be afraid.

Ella Innes. Why did you have to come back?

TWO

Ella was late. Lee had been expecting her at around seven, and it was already after nine. He had spent two hours twitching in his armchair, jumping up from time to time to look out of the window. It had been dark for several hours and the winter sky was folded with snow.

He was physically afraid of meeting her: if she didn’t show up, he wouldn’t be in the least dismayed. He was already prepared to dismiss the morning’s telephone call as a phantom, another dream; it would be better, far better, if the whole thing had never really happened.

Then there was a roaring underneath his window. He leaped from his seat to see headlamps blazing in his drive, clouds of exhaust in the frosty air. Lee hurried outside.

She was already climbing out of her car, an open-topped vintage sports model. She wore a flying jacket three sizes too large and a red scarf wound around her neck. She closed the door and stood motionless in the dark, looking at him.

What were they supposed to do? What was appropriate? To hug her, of course; he wanted to, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t even look her in the eye.

“You came down in this?” he said surveying the car. It was a fully restored spoke-wheeled 1935 MG Midget. “With the top down? In the middle of winter?”

Her breath was visible on the cold air. “It’s broken. I couldn’t fix it.”

Lee walked around the car and began fussing with the convertible roof. “It’s probably just a clip,” he said.

“Lee,” said Ella gently. “Leave it.”

Lee looked down at his hands. He felt ridiculous. When he looked up, he saw that her eyes were fixed on his. “Of course. Let’s go inside.”

With the door closed behind them, Ella looked around her as if she used to own the house. When she nodded, it was as if to confirm that she found everything much as expected. Lee took her bag. “Your hands are freezing!”

Ella’s smile was a reflex. “It’s been a long drive.”

“Maybe a drink of something?”

“Yes, something, thanks.”

That was how she was; always ironic. Silver moon-and-stars earrings glimmered at her ears. They left momentary tracers in the air as she flicked her hair from her eyes. Her hastily applied lipstick looked as if it came in one piece and could be lifted off like the milk-skin from hot chocolate. Ella looked interesting rather than beautiful, and she dressed neither for the attention of men nor for the critical approval of other women. Lee was hypnotized; she was more compelling now than she had ever been as a girl of twenty.

He didn’t miss a detail: her nose perhaps a couple of degrees too steep; her dark hair, long then, now worn shorter; and something like a faint cloud of suspicion in brown eyes. Underneath her flying jacket she wore a baggy pullover and slacks. She was busy unwinding the red scarf from her throat.

Her bag, a large, split-leather holdall with a broken zip, was stuffed full. Lee stowed it against an armchair. “Bohemian; you look bohemian,” he said, trying to imitate her teasing manner.

Ella followed him into the kitchen, where he poured overlarge brandies and set coffee to brew. “I know I’m a mess,” she said. “You look smart, that’s good; and you look well.” She flashed him a microsecond smile and bandaged the scarf around her hand.

“I don’t know why, but I feel dull against you.”

“You haven’t got what it takes to be dull.” In her flying jacket she looked like a wounded refugee from some fiery aerial combat. “I see you work in advertising.”

“It’s a job. I turn in every morning. Then I come home.”

She looked at him. He felt compelled to carry on talking. “I mean it’s narcotic. That’s how I like it.”

“You sound disappointed.”

“No; I really do like it like chat. But when I’m happily numb, narcotized, nodding my way through life, then the you-know-what starts over again.”

Ella stuffed the scarf into her pocket. “That’s what I’m here to talk about.”

“Oh dear. Pandora wants a little chat about her box.”

“Not my box; our box.”

Lee turned towards her. “Ella, I don’t want it opened up. I don’t know what’s going on, but it scares the liver out of me and I really don’t want it opened up.”

Ella put down her glass and took hold of his wrist. “Look, I don’t want it opened up again any more than you do. I’m as frightened by it as you are. I guessed—hoped, even—that you’d be having some of the same experiences as me. I only got in touch with you because—”

Lee put his hand to her mouth. “Can we sit down?”

They moved through to the living room, Ella discarding her scarf and jacket as she went. They sat and nursed their brandies.

“I got in touch with you,” Ella continued, “because of what we had together. What we did.”

Silence. “I’m starving,” said Ella suddenly. “What have you cooked for us?”

“Cooked? God!” He hadn’t even thought about food. “I’ll phone for takeaway, shall I?”

“No food in the house, eh?” She smiled. “I couldn’t help noticing the bachelor feel to the place.”

“I noticed you noticing.” Then Lee bit the biscuit. “Ella, will you be staying here tonight?”

“I thought I might. Unless it would be easier if I found a hotel.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You’ll stay here.”

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

“Only… Just so that it’s clear.”

“So that what’s clear?”

“Look; I didn’t drive two hundred and fifty miles with my foot flat down on the accelerator after an absence of twelve years to start our relationship up again. I couldn’t stand to have that opened up, as well.”

“Understood,” he said, waving his hands in the air, “I was just about to say that the spare room is ready for you. So you can calm down.”

“I’m already calm. You don’t need to tell me to calm myself.”

“That’s settled then.”

“Right, that’s settled.”

Lee took this concert of understanding as a suitable moment to escape to the kitchen. He closed the door behind him, putting his back to it as he expelled a deep breath. He was furious about that business of renewing their old relationship, not with Ella but with himself. He had made his feelings transparent, trailing her with spaniel eyes from the moment she had come into his house. He wanted to bury his head.

Their meal arrived. “Tell me,” she said, “what was happening before I phoned?”

Lee glanced over his shoulder as though there might be an enemy in the room. “It started around Christmas. I thought it was just some kind of throwback. That’s happened before, and there’s been no problem. Since then it has come with greater frequency. Over the last few nights it has come without fail.”

“Just the repeated awakening?”

“Yes. That’s all, thank God; I mean there have been one or two other weird things happening in there besides, but mostly it’s the repeater. It doesn’t sound much but it’s scaring the hell out of me.”

“It’s the same for me. I know how frightening it is. You get to dread every click or sudden movement in case you wake up and find yourself back in bed.”

“But I’ve even been testing myself in the dream, burning my hand, sticking pins into myself to see if I’m in or out: it doesn’t make any difference.”

“That’s how it was before.”

“Sure, but then, somehow, even though I’d get it wrong sometimes, I felt I could tell the essential difference. But not now. It gets so I don’t want to bother going to work, cooking my breakfast, washing my face even, in case I wake up. Every time something just a little bit off the wall happens, or if I get a client at work with a screw loose, I end up thinking I’ll wake up in five minutes and then I can go to work and deal with the real psychopaths.”

“I thought we were the real psychopaths.”

“What’s worse is that the dreams make more sense than what happens when I’m awake. When I was talking to you this morning I was convinced that it was just part of another repeater and that I’d put the phone down and wake up.”

“But you should have known that I’d pulled you out with the telephone. It was one of our old techniques for burrowing out. Or burrowing in.”

“I know that, but I didn’t ever trust it. I don’t entirely trust that business with the book either.”

“Can you remember anything the professor said about the repeater?”

“Only that he described it as a side effect, and said to try to enjoy it.”

“Yes, he was helpful like that.”

“When did it start happening with you?”

“Like you, around Christmas. Infrequently at first, then with regularity. I thought it was me; but it wasn’t just repeated dreams of waking up. It was some of the other stuff.”

“You went back to that place?” Lee was shocked.

“Not exactly. But I felt an overwhelming pull. Almost irresistible. I’ve been fighting it. That’s why I decided I had to get in touch, find out what was happening to you.”

“I know. I felt it too, pulling me back there, I mean. It was strong. I fought it. That’s when the repeaters started to really take hold.”

“Exactly. The more we fight off going back, the more the repeaters go to work on us.”

“But what would happen if we did give in? What would happen if we really did go back there? I couldn’t face it.”

“At first I wondered whether you’d been there,” said Ella, “whether you were up to something, trying to make contact with me.”

“No.”

“It was just a thought. I realize now.”

“Ella, there have been many times when I’ve wanted you. But never like that. It didn’t seem to hold so much fear for me when I was younger. Now even the thought of it can make me break into a cold sweat.”

Ella ran a hand through her hair, silver moon and stars glinting at her ears. “So where does that leave us?” she asked. “If it’s not you and it’s not me… Oh God, look at us, Lee, just look at us. What a pair of casualties. I’m trying to be brave, Lee, really I am, but I’m scared. So scared.”

Then Lee did what he should have done when he first saw Ella standing outside his house; he put his arms around her and kissed her, and let her cry for both of them. And when Ella cried that evening it was not only for the terror of the dreams that hung in chains around them. It was also for the unburdened, uncaring children they had been thirteen years ago, and for the thirteen years of distance and loss that had recast lovers as strangers.

“Which one of them is doing it, do you think?”

“We can’t be sure that it’s either of them.”

An open fire burned brightly in the hearth. Ella sat close to it, her legs drawn up under her. Lee sat behind her in an armchair. “You’re wrong. One of them is doing it. One of them is calling it all back. Is it him, do you think? Or is it her? We have to find out. Then we can stop them.”

“I was afraid you might say that.”

“No time for faint hearts,” said Ella.

“You really are making a lot of assumptions. You can’t know that the others are responsible for this.”

“So what are your ideas?”

“Me?”

“Exactly. How long do you think it’s going to be before these dreams, these repeaters turn into something else? Something more dangerous.”

Lee felt like a man in a paperweight snowstorm. Everything in his life had been settled and silenced. Then Ella had arrived, had shaken the glass, and was now watching him in his blizzard.

“When push comes to shove,” said Ella, “there’s only one question. Is it him? Or is it her?”

“Him, her; what’s the difference? It’s happening.”

“I think it’s her. I think we’ll find that she’s responsible.”

“Look, Ella, I’m really not convinced that we should get in touch with the others. It might not do any good. Sleeping dogs and all that. It might just make things worse. A whole lot worse. There must be something else we can do without running to them.”

“We’ve been through this once already. It’s not a question of running to them. It’s a matter of not running away from them.”

Lee wouldn’t have minded running away from all of them, Ella included. He knew where all this was leading and he didn’t like it. Ella had that manic cast to her eye. She wasn’t going to be shifted.

“So what do we do?” she said.

“You’re the one with all the plans.”

“So it appears. Listen, it’s simple. You’re going to have to go after one of them; I’m going to have to go after the other. No, don’t look like that. Neither of us wants to do it, but neither of us wants this thing opened up again either. You know where it can all lead, and you’re just as afraid of that as I am. You also know that one of the others must be responsible for starting it up again. There can’t be any other explanation. We’ll have to track them down and find out what’s going on.”

“How the hell are we going to find them?”

“Just like I found you. We’re going to use a little bit of intelligence and a little bit of insight. You’ll have to take a break from selling washing powder or whatever important thing it is you do.”

“I can’t take time off from work! What will I tell them?”

“Tell them you’re ill! Tell them you’re mentally disturbed! That’s something like the truth, isn’t it? Our hold on reality is a little tenuous at the moment, isn’t it? What do I care what you tell them?”

“Are you getting angry with me?”

“I’m just trying to give you a sense of urgency, though God knows why. This morning when I phoned you were hardly able to speak.”

“I don’t need reminding.”

“Lee, we could simply do nothing about it. We could just forget it. Until tomorrow morning, that is, when you’re going out of your mind because you don’t know if you’re awake or you’re dreaming. Until you want to scream, and then you open your mouth and wake up. Or think you’ve woken up, so you want to scream again. Yes, we could do that. Then you could wonder if this conversation was all a dream.”

“You can see right into my mind, can’t you, Ella Innes?”

Ella softened. “Remember that psychological test the professor gave us? You’re walking through the woods? You see a bear. What do you do? You always go around it. I always approach it.”

“Sometimes to get a mauling.”

“That’s life,” said Ella. “But sometimes the bear turns into a prince. You need me here, Lee. To push you on. To make you face up.”

“Thanks all the same but I never had any use for a prince.”

“Only for a princess, eh?”

He hated the way she reasserted her position so easily. She always seemed able to guess his thoughts. More seriously, she was already in the driving seat. He had planned not to let that happen.

He looked at her as she gazed into the grate, her skin reflecting the firelight. Yes, the years had left their mark here and there. Her face was touched with faint runes, lines of personal history he wanted to read but couldn’t. As for himself, he had stopped pretending. These few hours with Ella had stripped him bare. The scaling-over of the years had been uncovered, old feelings made new, leaving him exposed, inferior, in love with her. How did she do that?

He leaned forward and kissed her neck. He felt her stiffen, but she didn’t pull away.

“What are you doing, Lee?”

“I’m kissing you.”

She turned around. “Let’s not add confusion to a bad situation, eh?”

It seemed to Lee that he had been, on the contrary, trying to straighten things out. He said nothing. Ella closed the issue by standing up.

“I’m very tired. Can we say that it’s settled? You go after one of them, I go after the other?”

Lee shrugged.

“As of tomorrow?”

“As of tomorrow.” He looked unhappy.

“Dreams won’t wait, Lee.”

“No; they won’t, will they?”

“I think it would be better if I went for her. I can talk with her. You go after him.”

“You make it sound like a bounty hunt.”

“It won’t be as easy as that. Now, show me my room. It’s late.”

THREE

She had to move fast to be on time for the ferry. With about twenty minutes to spare she drove the Midget on to the boat at Stranraer, and was glad to get out to stretch her legs. After spending the night at Lee’s flat she had driven back to her house in Cumbria, had a second bad night’s sleep before driving hard to catch the boat to Larne.

Slipping out of the harbour at Stranraer, with the dockside diminishing with each blink, she felt the sea breeze stir around her and along with it came her first misgivings about what she was doing, doubts about her Northern Ireland mission. All her energies had gone into persuading Lee to trust her instincts and follow her lead. She hadn’t thought to stand back and question her convictions.

She thought about Lee, at his house, wanting to kiss her. She had no illusions about it. It was an act of desperation. He thought that a renewal of their relationship would be a way of holding off terror; he wanted to distil from intimacy the bitter-sweet salve which offers protection.

Lee, stolid Lee, had lowered his eyes in an attempt to disguise a disappointment that would have been no more obvious if he had cried out loud and smitten his brow. He was too gentle to do anything but accept her rejection and retire to his bed, where he would curl up with his confusion. But in the night, when Ella had felt the bad dreams thickening around her like storm clouds, she had thought of Lee, lying asleep and vulnerable in the darkness of his room. So she’d confused him even further by going to him and slipping into his bed.

Lee had woken up to feel her next to him.

“I’m cold; go back to sleep.” Which was what he did, happily; and for which Ella was thankful.

In the morning Ella had felt the muscular warmth of Lee’s arms wrapped around her waist, though he slept on. She could feel his erection becoming hard against the back of her thighs. Sliding out of his unrestraining arms, she pulled on some clothes and opened the blinds. She put coffee on to brew and walked out of the flat, leaving the door open.

Lee was woken by the telephone. He looked around for Ella. He could smell the fresh coffee brewing.

“It’s me.”

“Where are you?”

“A hundred yards down the street. Thought I’d pull you out of it with the telephone. We don’t want any bad starts to the day.”

“You’re a life saver, Ella.”

“One day you might save mine.” Click.

Lee had showered by the time Ella returned, clutching a bag of croissants. “It’s good,” he said. “I feel more confident this morning. There’s a clarity which I haven’t felt for a while. The smell of the coffee and the croissants. This is awake.”

Lee’s confidence brought a lot of things back to Ella. But if she suspected that it was neither coffee nor croissants that made Lee feel stronger, she didn’t say anything. Anyway, she had to agree with him. It was true; there was a kind of sharpness, an extra definition about things today. Outside in the street she had sensed a crackle in the morning air, and she had been confident that this morning they would be untroubled by the nightmare procession of false awakenings.

Experience told her not to waste hope on this respite. Yet it was in that morning’s spirit of optimism that they had drawn up their campaign to contact the others. They had already agreed that it should be Ella who would go to Northern Ireland.

Which was how she came to be standing out on deck on the ferry to Lame. It was the last day of February, too cold to spend more than a few minutes outside, too cold altogether for most people, which left her with the deck to herself. Ella loved it, huddled in her flying jacket, a bitter wind raking her hair, and the ferry dipping through the spume of the waves.

But when the sky darkened to the colour of a bruise, and the sea turned black, her doubts started to thicken. She knew that the voyage would reawaken the one thing that she least wanted. The thought sickened her. Then the wind picked up a foul stench off the water. It was a whiff of corruption; a secret known only to the sea.

The boat rose and fell. Over the stern a ragged company of grey-backed gulls wheeled and dived. But it was neither cruel beaks nor talons, nor the gulls’ greedy eyes that fascinated and terrified Ella as she stared out to sea. It was the hovering nameless thing that went scavenging and sucking at the wake of her journey, and in the wake of the bad dreams that would come to threaten them all.

FOUR

This wasn’t what he had wanted at all, scuttling around trying to track someone down without knowing if he was dead or alive, emigrated, gaoled, dropped out, socially elevated or just erased from the face of the earth; trying to find a character whose company he couldn’t abide and who under normal circumstances he would cross vast deserts to avoid.

Brad Cousins. Where the hell are you now?

The trail was erratic. Ella had already exercised her powers by obtaining—against university policy—an original home address and telephone number in Sale, Manchester. It led to an odd phone call.

“Mr, Cousins? My name is Lee Peterson. I’m an old… friend of your son, from university days. I’m trying to get in touch with him.” The line started crackling. “Do you know where I could get hold of him?”

“Nope.”

“No idea?”

“I don’t ask; he don’t tell.” Lee could hear the man’s asthmatic breathing.

“Would Mrs. Cousins know?”

“She might; but she’ll not tell; she’s been dead six year since.”

The line was beginning to break up.

“Where was he last time you heard?”

“Saudi… Germany… Yugoslavia…” He pronounced this last with a J.

“Can’t you give me an idea?”

At last, and with an air of crushing disinterest, the man yielded the name PhileCo, a Midlands pharmaceutical company his son had worked for some time ago. From PhileCo the unpromising trail led through four drug companies, for which Cousins had been a sales rep in less than as many years. It ran cold with a West Country firm called Lytex, where a chatty personnel officer admitted that, yes, the man had been an employee of the company representing their product to GPs in the region, but that after a few months of mediocre returns he had stopped weighing in for work. Lee emerged from the conversation with an address in Cornwall.

He made careful preparations, packing a double change of clothes, a set of brushes, a travel shaver and a gift manicure set. A manicure set? He wondered when he had become so fastidious.

He took the train to Plymouth, and spent the journey sipping weak tea and gazing gloomily at the landscape. In the carriage window he had three or more ears, multiple eyebrows and chins to spare. He almost liked himself better that way.

His thoughts turned to Ella. Their reunion had plunged him back into the morass of his adolescent longing. He didn’t know whether to blame that on the dreaming or on Ella. He had hoped that his greater maturity would do something to defuse the excitement he felt in her presence, but just thinking about her made his cheeks burn.

She was a witch, he had decided. Or at least a mesmerist or a spellbinder of some kind. It was Ella, after all, who had led him into this whole bizarre situation. All she claimed to want was an end to the dreaming. Yet he knew that Ella was notoriously unclear about her own state of mind. She was not as in control as she liked to appear, and he knew that, behind her assertiveness, she would be depending on his support.

Her behaviour back at his flat had been ambiguous to say the least. She seemed to be signalling that she wanted intimacy, and yet she had kept him at arm’s length. Then she had climbed into his bed half-way through the night, and he had had to pretend to be asleep to avoid making love to her. But at least since she had come his nights had been undisturbed by the repeated dream awakenings.

At Plymouth, Lee hired a Cavalier from a lady in an orange costume and lopsided orange lipstick (which made him think of Ella again). It was already late afternoon.

Dusk was settling. He drove out of town and crossed the Tamar Bridge into Cornwall, heading towards Gunnislake. By the time he reached the village it was dark, and then he got hopelessly lost looking for his turn-off. Eventually he found it—hardly more than a dirt track—and arrived at two isolated cottages. One slouched in semi-derelict condition with a collapsed roof and broken windows; the second was in only slightly better shape. A bare light bulb was burning in a downstairs room.

He drove his car as close as he could to the front door. On a wooden plaque on the wall, weather-split and almost completely effaced, Lee could just about discern the word Elderwine, He sighed, less than happy that he’d found the place.

He switched off the engine and killed the lights. He sat for a moment, hoping that someone would appear. Then he got out of the car and went to the door. No one answered his knock. He tried again, waited, and pushed at the handle. The door swung open; a pile of unopened envelopes lay on the mat. They were addressed to Brad Cousins. Lee went in.

FIVE

Ella, meanwhile, found her prey with relative ease. The ferry journey, the disembarkation and the drive down to Fermanagh had gone smoothly, and she was soon walking unchallenged through the doors of the primary school. Through a glass window in a classroom door she saw the woman she sought.

Honora Brennan was gathering up stubbed-out paint brushes and jam jars of murky water, offering words of encouragement after an end-of-day paint your fantasy session—yes anything you like, the sky the trees the stars at night. Is that the stars at night, she says to one seven-year-old with a pink NHS eye patch, no he says it’s the mortar that got me da, is it she says, put it in the pile with the others and wash out your brushes in the sink. On instinct Honora looked up and saw Ella watching her.

Briskly, she dismissed the class, then turned to rinse the paint-pots as if by this chore she could make the other woman disappear. Ella willed her to turn around: Don’t block me out Honora. If Honora heard the words, she fought them.

“Yes, I’m here; you’re not dreaming.”

Honora stiffened, stacking the pots in a precise pyramid.

“How did you get here?” Her back still turned, she scrubbed at an already gleaming jar.

“You can still get a boat across the water.”

“I’m sorry, Ella. I wanted to say ‘It’s lovely to see you’ but I didn’t feel it.”

“Then you were right not to say it.”

Honora busied herself thumb tacking the children’s paintings to the wall. Ella waited.

“Do you know why I came?”

Honora looked into her eyes for the first time. “Can’t we go somewhere?”

Outside, walking side by side in their thick winter coats, Ella was surprised when Honora gently linked arms with her. She remembered that type of endearing, girlish gesture so well; that, and a fresh smell of camomile and rainwater. Honora’s tawny hair fell as it always had, into a tight nest of curls and ringlets. She exuded a vulnerability that made Ella, by contrast, feel coarse.

They went to a small tea shop and peered at each other. The window was misted with condensation. Every time someone came in or left, a door-shaped wedge of cold air sent a shiver around the seated customers. Outside a UDR soldier with his cockade feather erect patrolled by with that circumspect hip-swivelling security walk. Ella watched him.

“After a while you stop seeing them.”

“Are we talking about soldiers?”

“What else? They look like shadows; but they’re real.”

“And what about the real shadows?”

Ella flattered herself that she always knew when someone was dissembling. She had an idea that she could peer, if not into a person’s darkest heart, then at least into the blue or grey or green of their eyes, where she might detect the microscopic splash imperceptible to others. Honora dropped her eyes and tried to change the subject.

“You gave me the fright of my life when I saw you outside the classroom. I never expected to see you again, least of all here. It suddenly brought it all back to me. How we were and all that. Weren’t we crazy then, Ella? Wasn’t it all madness?”

“Oh yes, it was that all right.”

“But it’s grand to see you. Really it is.”

“I wish you meant that.” The remark made Honora look away again. “You know why I came to see you.”

“You want to talk to me about dreams?”

“We could talk about the IRA instead. Or the Mountains of Mourne. Or about Donegal tweed…”

“All right, all right. So, let’s talk about dreams. I’m happy to talk about dreams, if that’s what you want me to talk about.”

“I want to talk about the kind of things that happened to us while we were at university. I mean, if anything like that has been happening to you lately.”

“Oh, come on Ella! Don’t you think I didn’t have enough with what happened at the time? I put it all behind me. I was glad to get away from it when I had the chance. And now it’s all in the past.”

“It’s not in the past. It’s back and it’s not nice.”

“But don’t you see what it is!” Honora cried. “Just this talking about it is what does it. You’re dredging it all up again. Why can’t you leave it alone? The more you want to discuss and analyze and toss it back and forth the more you bring it all back again. It was a mistake, something we did when we were young. It’s something we shouldn’t keep going back to; like an old—”

“Like an old affair?”

“Something like that.”

“Lee said some very similar things, about not wanting to open it all up.”

“Well, he’s right. Me and him both.”

“But he’s a different kind of person. Remember what we used to call the repeater? He’s been having some of those dreams again. Only it’s not a joke any more. Some mornings it’s panic…”

“Are you living with Lee?”

“No, but I know what you’re thinking, and you’re wrong. We didn’t get together and resurrect this dreaming thing. It started happening to both of us independently. I got frightened, so I got in touch with Lee. That was when I found that the same things were happening to him. I’d already decided that one of the original circle was muddying the pool; so if it wasn’t me and it wasn’t Lee…”

“You thought it might be me.”

“I had to come and find you, at least. You can understand that, can’t you?”

“Yes, I can understand it.”

Dusk had rolled over the street outside the tea shop. A hand switched on dim lights. Now half of Honora’s face was in grey shadow, the other half washed by unhelpful amber light. Another patrol passed by the misted window.

Ella was still trying to get Honora to pick up the ball. “So you haven’t been troubled by any of that… weird stuff? No repeaters. No flashbacks. None of it?”

“Not at all.” Honora’s eyes were too wide open to be telling the truth.

“Never, over the years?”

“Not since what happened at university. For a year or two after that I did have the occasional nightmare, but that was more of the regular order of bad dreams. If you want my opinion, I’m glad I can’t help you. It’s dead and gone, and I’d like to keep it that way.”

Honora said all of this too cheerfully, working a fraction too hard at trying to keep it light. She was smiling at Ella with those delicate features, but now she was looking like a toy left out in the rain. Yes; there was a pallor under the skin left by the sleeping pills, Ella could guess that; but most revealing were the very fine lines, a tiny chain of folds in her skin which she saw as knives, daggers turned inwards on the subject.

“And over the years you’ve never had any contact with—”

“None.” Honora cut Ella very short. “I don’t even want to think about him, far less talk about him. Can we pay this bill?”

Ella sat back.

“I wasn’t going to ask you to stay,” said Honora with a smile, “but I can’t really not, now can I?”

“No, you can’t really not. We’ve got a hundred other things to catch up on.”

They threaded their way through the streets of the town, Honora once again linking arms with her old friend. Her house was a two-up two-down brick terrace, its interior painted in bold primary colours. It was almost obsessively tidy, except in the back room which was cluttered with the unframed canvases and rolls of cartridge paper which Honora used for painting and drawing.

“In the summer I still go into town and paint portraits for American and German tourists,” Honora explained. “And sometimes I get commissions to paint people’s pets. Dreadful!”

“Stinking!” Ella agreed brightly.

One painting rested on a chair, draped with a chequered tablecloth. “Can I see?” Ella asked. But Honora ushered her gently out of the room and switched off the light. Ella suddenly knew exactly what lay under the cloth, as if she herself had splashed it on the canvas in luminous paint.

“What would you like to do while you’re here?” Honora asked hurriedly.

“You mean apart from talking about dreams?”

Honora looked defeated.

“Why did you lie to me, Honora? You never used to lie.”

Honora turned to the window. “All right, the dreams have been back. I don’t even like talking about it. I don’t know what’s happened, why the… repeaters are frightening me again. I hadn’t experienced them for over ten years. I thought you must have been doing something, perhaps you and Lee, cooking something up together, resurrecting the dreaming. I thought you might want to include me in some scheme or other…”

“I told you; Lee and I don’t want it any more than you do.”

“Oh I realize that now. But I just want to black it out, hide somewhere, not talk about it, not think about it. When you came I thought: Oh God no, this is why the dreams have been coming back, leave me out of it.”

“Do you think us coming together can make things worse?”

“I don’t know anything; it just triggers a lot of… associations.”

“The point is, if it’s not you or Lee or me, then it must be…”

“Yes. I was afraid of him. My God Ella, what’s happening to us?”

Ella didn’t answer. “We should go out tonight,” she said, trying to brighten things.

“I never go out.”

“You do this evening. I want Guinness and didley-didley music, and you can show me where to get it.”

All protests were brushed aside, and Honora, who an astonished, high-spirited Ella later discovered hadn’t been outside her house socially for two whole years, was dragged out in a state of excitement and nervous terror mixed. When they left the house it was snowing; soft, light flakes of snow falling under the amber streetlamps, melting the instant they touched the ground.

SIX

Elderwine Cottage, damp and stinking. Stooping to gather a fistful of letters franked more than a fortnight before; Lee yelled something intended to be Hallo or Anyone In but which came out unintelligibly between. Off right, a narrow hall of razor-edged shadows admitted to a room with a bare light bulb burning. He carefully nudged open the door. It was ankle deep in newspapers and litter. Some of the papers were unread and folded neatly in piles, some had obviously served as wrappings for a variety of takeaway foods. Judging by the smell, some still did. Floating in the debris were dozens of brown ale and whiskey empties, bottles frozen neck-up in a polluted lake. In the next room he tried flicking on a light switch for a bulb that was missing. He passed through to the kitchen. A tinker’s workshop of pans and dishes was stacked high in the sink which was full of grey water, a half-inch slab of grease on the surface; rock-hard doorsteps of sliced bread grew fibrous green beards; disposable fast food cartons were left strategically, still offering half of their original contents; milk bottles stood with their contents crusting in phases of metamorphosis. It was more like a biochemist’s laboratory than a kitchen.

“Brad Cousins!” He climbed the creaking wooden steps and found upstairs two cold empty rooms with generations of paper stripping itself from the walls. Downstairs again, he took a second look in the back room with the broken light. There was a man asleep on the couch, he looked like a bundled sack, roped and tied at the top.

“Is that you Brad?” he said loudly. The sack didn’t stir, but he knew that he had found his man.

Brad Cousins slept on, his jaw slack and his mouth open, a string of saliva swinging from his chin to his T-shirt like a delicate piece of suspension engineering. A pair of scuffed placeless brogues was kicked off at the end of the couch, adding to the general stench of lived-in nylon socks. From matted head to swollen foot, the sleeping body exuded a root odour, and a sweet-rotten scent of sweat and alcohol commingled.

“Brad. Brad, it’s Lee. Lee Peterson.”

One crimson-cupped eye opened. Lee found himself talking as though through a drainpipe. “Brad. I’ve come a long way to see you. I’ve come to talk to you, Brad. We have to talk. All right?”

The bloodshot eye glazed over, an inner protective membrane forming across it.

“Brad. I want you to listen, Brad. Can you hear me? There are some questions I need to ask you.”

The eye closed. “No, don’t go to sleep again, Brad. I don’t want you to go back to sleep. Brad. Brad. Wake up, Brad.”

This time both eyes opened and with a startling marionette movement he jerked himself upright on the couch. His eyes were like glass beads fixed on Lee. Finally he got up and lurched unsteadily out of the room. Lee heard him go out through the back door and then heard the clanking mechanism of the backyard toilet flush. He returned without a word.

“Brad. Listen to what I’m saying—”

“You have my permission to stop talking to me as if I’m in a coma,” Cousins interrupted. “If I’m not saying much right now it’s because I’m conducting a lively debate with myself. Interior dialogue. If the better half of me wins the debate, I’ll go back to sleep. Then when I wake up you won’t be here and I’ll feel much happier.”

“Don’t count on it.”

“OK, so why are you here? Let me run the options. I borrowed half a quid from you when we were students and you’ve come to get it back. No? Your marriage is on the rocks and you want some advice from your ol’ mate Brad Cousins who always knew how to handle women. Yes? Or you need a career break and you want me to use my position to pull a few strings for you, is that it? Eh? Well I don’t have half a quid, I never give advice and my influence is on the wane. You wasted a journey. You can go.” He leaned back and closed his eyes.

“Just came to have a little talk with you, Brad.”

“Are you still here? I thought I was only—”

“Dreaming?”

“What do you want?” Brad scowled play-time over.

“The booze doesn’t keep the dreams away, does it?”

Cousins got up and wobbled over to the other side of the room, steadying himself against a heavy oak sideboard. “Away at bay I pray they stay.”

“You’re still pissed.”

Cousins drew a circle in the air and punctured it with a nicotine-dyed finger. “I’d forgotten how telepathically perceptive you were.”

“Do you sleep well?”

“I sleep like a baby log. Thanks.”

“No bad dreams?”

“Ah! Dreamscreams?”

“Any repeaters?”

“Dreameaters?”

“Ever go back there?”

“Dreamscare?”

“You like this game?”

“Why not. How long can we play?”

“How long can you keep it up? How long can you go on pretending?”

“You were always boring; did I ever tell you that? Always boring.”

“Why won’t you talk about it?”

“It. What is it, exactly?” The cabinet door in the sideboard had lost its handle. Cousins expertly prised it open with his fingertips. He lifted out a third-full bottle of Scotch and a dusty, gluey-looking tumbler with a long human hair, probably his own, stuck at the rim.

The whiskey splashed into the tumbler as if it were Cola. No companion drink was offered. “It is an unappreciated visit from an unwanted past. It appears when you’re least expecting it, and when you least want it. It comes when you are asleep, when you thought you were enjoying yourself, defences down, getting in the zeds. It knows that it’s not welcome, but it sits there uninvited in your comfortable squalid little nest with its ridiculous mouth open asking for answers to questions.”

“I can’t say that age or booze has had a mellowing effect on you.”

“Mellowing? Spare me. You’ve come to discuss my spiritual development.”

“People like you don’t develop; they ferment. I’ve come to talk about dreaming.”

At that last word, Cousins moved to the window, glass in hand. He leaned against the window-sill and peered over at the neighbouring tumbledown cottage. “No, don’t change the subject. Really. I’m always interested in your observations concerning my moral and social progress. Who will you be reporting back to, I wonder.”

“I’ve seen Ella, if that’s what you mean. That’s why I’m here.”

“How is the old slag? Has she slept her way to prominence? Good luck to her and all who sail in her.” He seemed to have spotted something and leaned toward the window.

“What about you?” Lee trying to be barbed in return. “Did you ever see Honora Brennan again?”

Cousins tried to spit out the hair that caught in his mouth. He kept his back turned as Lee spoke. “You know why I came here. Someone’s been stirring things up. Now either you’ve been back there muddying the water, or if it’s not you, then at least like Ella and myself you’ve been caught in the backwash.”

“What can I do against such dazzling logic?”

“You can drop the act; you’re as frightened as we are.”

“Aw, shaddup.”

“What are you afraid of? Don’t want to be reminded of what happened back there? Don’t want to remember your special part in it?”

“All right! All right! I did go back there as a matter of fact. I didn’t want to go. In fact I tried bloody hard not to go. I spent night after bloody night fighting to keep it away. But it was too strong. It got so I was afraid to go to sleep at night, because I knew what was going to happen. I used pills to stay awake for three or four days, and then when the inevitable happened I didn’t have the strength left to resist it.” He turned to face Lee across the room. “You wouldn’t recognize the old place now: they’ve got penny arcades and fat lady shows, and hot-dog stands and end-of-pier comedy acts. It’s quite a tourist pull these days; you should get Ella to go down there with you for the bank holiday.”

“You’re scared, Cousins.” Lee stood up. “You live ankle deep in shit and you’re scared. I can smell it on you, even through all the booze.”

“And I don’t even owe you the time of day!”

He turned back to the window. Lee was at a loss. Swaying uneasily against the unlit fireplace, he rubbed his hand along the dusty mantelpiece, waiting for resolution to materialize out of nothing. Cousins nodded at the crumbling cottage across the yard. “She’s out there. I’ve seen her.”

Lee stepped across to the window. He could see nothing.

“Who? Who are you talking about? Ella?”

“Noooo,” waving a finger at the dereliction. “Not Ella. Her.”

“There’s nothing. Nothing.”

“Did you see that? Did you see that light there—just a flicker. You couldn’t have missed it. Did you see it?”

Cousins’s gluey eyes were pressed against the window. He stank. Lee stepped back, looked around at the filth and debris of the room, wondered what he was doing there. There was no trace of light in the other cottage. He had had enough.

“To hell with it. I didn’t see anything. And I’m going. I shouldn’t even have come.”

It was as if a spell had been lifted. He was appalled that he had allowed Ella to pack him off on this fool’s errand. This confrontation disgusted him. But what really vexed him was not that Brad was a sot but that there was something about Brad’s slither into alcoholic slush that was only superficially different to his own dash for stiff conformity. Both of them were casualties—Ella’s word for it: men whose souls leaked through the corrosion which followed brilliant dreaming.

Now Ella had got him scurrying down here rattling chains and locks that were turning to dust in his hands. He felt alone, he wanted his neat home, his hermetically sealed box, wanted not to be confronted with this degenerate version of himself where the only distinction between them was a full set of buttons and a splash of cologne.

“You can… put your head down here for the night…” Cousins said, suddenly sheepish.

“What?” A mirthless laugh. “Is that a funny? Thanks, old friend, but no thanks. I’ll take my chances of roughing it at The Plough, back down the road.”

Back behind the steering wheel, he turned his headlamps up full on the derelict cottage. He had let Cousins spook him. He could still see him watching from the window. Turning the car around rapidly he drove back on to the road, switching on the wireless for the comfort of a Radio 4 voice.

At the Plough, with barely more customers than staff, he had no difficulty in getting accommodation for the night. He was shown to a room with an uneven floor and heavy Victorian furniture. Before turning in, he opened a window and looked out across the moonless, starless valley, wondering why he had bothered to come, but already knowing the answer. In the comfortable bed he fell into a fitful sleep; a seamless patchwork of dreams crossing easily from past to present and back again to the past.