‘…The provenance of the Louvre Mona Lisa was finally established in the Spring of 1983, when margin notes written contemporaneously by Agostino Vespucci declared that “a fine painting of Lisa del Giocondo as she prepares to slumber is currently being [painted] by Leonardo”. Given that the Louvre Mona Lisa has her depicted as undeniably thin, the true da Vinci is now thought to be the Fat Lisa currently on display in Isleworth…’
There was dreamless sleep, at first, and darkness. But not quite as I remembered the darkness, as simply shapeless, timeless ebony, but darkness as in an unlit hall – full of memories, and places, and peoples and things – the marker-stones of my life’s experience. Then a chasm, like a rent of linen, but both visual and aural, and in a second I was back: Birgitta, on the beach, blue-and-white towel, the bathing suit of fresh-leaf green and that orange-and-red parasol of spectacular size and splendour. The day was the same, the beach was the same, the Argentinian Queen was the same. I too was the same – not Charlie Worthing, but another, different, Charlie: Birgitta’s Charlie, sitting with her on the striped towel, wearing a black bathing suit and white pumps.
She looked at me and smiled, and I felt myself smile back. The dream was, as far as I could see, identical in every detail. The gulls cackled from on high, and the scent of the tide drifted in on the breeze. She gave me her captivating smile, and pushed the hair once more behind her ear. I was Charles, and she was Birgitta, and this was their perfect moment.
‘I love you, Charlie.’
‘I love you, Birgitta.’
The breakers boomed and then the child, with a gurgle of laughter, chased a beach ball toward shore’s edge. Again.
‘Is this really me?’ I asked, repeating myself before I’d realised it.
Birgitta blinked at me and smiled.
‘You’re Charlie now, my Charlie,’ she said with a giggle. ‘Try not to think about the facility and HiberTech Security. Just today and tomorrow, forty-eight hours. You and me. What Dreams May Come.’
‘What Dreams May Come,’ I replied.
Knowing that I might wake soon, I looked around, eager to soak in the fine detail.
Behind us was a path leading back up to the car park, where there would be a café of whitewashed clapboard that sold the best pistachio ice cream in the nation. We were close to where Birgitta’s mother lived, and would be staying in the room above the car house with its double brass bed, boxwood panelling and lace curtains. We’d leave early on Sunday and stop at Mumbles Pier to eat cockles and laver bread, while ‘Groove Me’ played on a wireless close by. I knew all these things without knowing how I knew, and odder still, I couldn’t just remember backwards, I could remember forwards. The beach was only a memory of better times, many years before. Following this, Birgitta and I had travelled separately to Sector Twelve. She’d painted and I’d worked at HiberTech as an orderly in the Sleep Sciences Division, Project Lazarus. We’d met rarely but passionately, and then we’d been parted, this time for good.
‘Happy snap?’ said a photographer who was plying his trade up and down the beach. ‘Proper tidy you’ll look and as reasonably priced as anywhere you’ll find.’
This was as far as I’d got in the dream the first time round and I expected to be awoken again, but I wasn’t. We agreed and he took the Polaroid, handed it to us and told us he would be back to pick up payment if it came out ‘to our proper satisfaction’. We watched the picture emerge, cementing the moment in time. It was the first time I got to see what I looked like. Birgitta’s Charles was ridiculously handsome, with fine features and dark curly hair that half obscured his eyes. Despite this, he looked somehow lost, hopeless and ultimately doomed—
—I was sitting at the base of an ancient oak, looking up. The spread of the tree went almost to the periphery of my vision, and the light of a fresh Summer’s morning filtered through the leaves. I blinked several times and sat up. The beach dream had abruptly cut out. Not with a fade or a segue but a tear. I was now in another place, another dream – one that I realised very quickly that Watson, Smalls, Moody, Birgitta and Lloyd had all visited before me.
I was sitting atop a rough stack of boulders that had been piled against the tree in a haphazard manner. The stones were large and of a bluish sandstone, smooth and flat and now an artificial island around the trunk. All about me the deep blue sky was punctuated by puffy clouds, and the surrounding grass stretched away in every direction to the horizon.
This felt, like the Birgitta dream that immediately preceded it, utterly real. Every detail was there about me – the texture in the bark, the veins in the leaves, the yellow bursts of lichen upon the rocks. The only evidence I had that this wasn’t real was that I knew it wasn’t. Nothing else. If that was so, then I could understand how Moody and Watson might have confused the two.
I looked at my hands. They still weren’t mine. But they weren’t Charles’ either.
They were old. A good seven decades, wrinkled, covered with liver spots and trembling. I felt weak, too, and the left side of my body had a sort of fuzzy dullness to it. Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly given his presence in all our lives, I was now dreaming I was Don Hector. His oldness, his dignity, his manner. But I wasn’t wholly him, I was partly him. Me, dreaming I was him, or him, dreaming he was me – I could only be sure I wasn’t Don Hector as he’d died two years before.
I laughed out loud. Not simply at the bold invention of my mind, but the clarity. If this was what dreaming was like, then I had missed a phenomenon of considerable entertainment and distraction. Sure, the extra energy spent in their subconscious creation would require additional pounds at Slumberdown, but from what I could see, it would be worth it. This was a new, exciting reality.
This was escape.
I inhaled deeply and the sweet scent of Summer filled my lungs, the subtle odour of warm grass and meadowsweet. I looked around to see if Clytemnestra wasn’t also somewhere about, hanging over me with her dagger, and was relieved to find that she wasn’t. But something else was, something that had been predicted along with the oak and the boulders.
The blue Buick.
The car was from the more reserved and elegant era of American automotive design, before the dominance of fins and chrome. It wasn’t new, and far from pristine. Rust speckled the chrome bumpers, poorly repaired crash damage had wrinkled the offside front wing and the driver’s window was jammed half down and discoloured milky-white. Next to the Buick a picnic was laid out on a red blanket, a bottle of wine in a cooler, a folding chair. Beyond the car, about a half-mile away, I could see, sitting quite by itself on the unceasing carpet of green a Morpheleum, a temple to the god Morpheus. Old, abandoned, but looking incongruous, yet somehow safe.
I could make an intelligent guess as to how these two dream scenarios had been created in my mind. First of a woman whom I’d met and liked and mixed with her paintings and my holidays in the Gower, and secondly, the dream I had been told about, mixed with the inescapable omniscience of Don Hector and HiberTech. I already had the broad parameters; my mind had filled in the rest like so much builder’s plaster. It was quite a feat – no wonder dreams burned energy.
I was about to step from the boulders when I stopped. Birgitta, Moody and Porter Lloyd had all warned me: stay on the rocks.
Intrigued, I stepped down to one of the lower stones and prodded the soil with an inquisitive toe. Almost immediately a hand shot out of the ground and closed around my ankle with a vice-like grip. I cried out in horror, swayed and almost fell off the rocks, then recovered and pulled back as hard as I could, my fingernails splitting and cracking where I grasped the stone. And then, after we had tussled for a few seconds the hand abruptly let go and swiftly sank from view while I retreated to the highest point of the rock-pile. Notwithstanding the fact that I knew that none of this was real, I sat shaking, breathing in short gasps. I then noticed that there were more hands – dozens if not hundreds – and watched with an increasing sense of horror as they moved slowly around the tree, as attackers might circle a hopeless last defence. Occasionally they would halt to fuss with a tussock of grass, sniff the air and occasionally squabble before carrying on with their patrol. I knew now what Moody had meant when he spoke in horrified tones of the hands.
No, wait, back up a moment. Upon reflection, I couldn’t have known what Moody had been frightened of. He’d only made mention of ‘hands out to get him’. I must have simply invented the scenario to fit in with the trees and the rocks. The outline was the same, the dream was different.
And then, quite suddenly, a woman’s sharp voice from behind me cut into my trail of thought, and that was strange, because there’d been no one there when I last looked.
‘We know of a remote farm in Lincolnshire,’ came the woman’s voice in a slow, persuasive tone, ‘where Mrs Buckley lives. Every July, peas grow there.’
I turned. There was a woman standing next to the Buick, and she was staring at me with a folksy smile, had grey hair tied up in a bun and was wearing a white blouse and a red dress around which was tied a kitchen apron. It was Mrs Nesbit, as she appeared in the endless corporate logos, film and TV commercials – but not the current Mrs Nesbit actress: this was a much younger Zsazsa LeChat, from eight Mrs Nesbits ago. She looked as though she was unaware of her surroundings, and there was a sense of shimmering otherness about her – as though she were not part of the dream, but somehow trespassing within it.
I’d added a younger Zsazsa to the dream, too.
‘Hello,’ I said.
There was a short blast of static and she spoke again. But although the voice appeared to be coming from Mrs Nesbit, the words didn’t match the movements of her mouth. She was the one from where the voice was emerging, but she wasn’t the one speaking. It was Mrs Nesbit, and it wasn’t, just as I was both myself and Don Hector, all at the same time.
‘Deputy Worthing?’ she said, and her voice seemed to sear a hole into my mind like a red-hot needle. I felt myself lift out of the Dreamstate as the pain brought me perilously close to waking, and for a moment I could see the faint outline of Clytemnestra, the open door to the living room and the bedside clock before I fell back into the Dreamstate.
‘Steady, Charlie, we need you asleep. Now: who do you think you are?’
‘I think I’m… Don Hector.’
‘Presumptuous of you, wouldn’t you say? Describe the Buick.’
‘It’s blue, the colour of the sky,’ I said, ‘it’s not new and has various damaged parts, a bit of rust, an AA badge on the grille, off kilter.’
Mrs Nesbit smiled again. She was looking at me, but her eyes were unseeing. What I was witnessing, she could not. She seemed more brightly coloured than the surroundings, and had a thin sparkly aura that ran all around her.
‘Tell me about your childhood.’
‘Pool from birth,’ I said, ‘insurance write-off. I wasn’t adopted on account of my noggin and biting off Gary Findlay’s ear.’
‘Not you – the other you. I want to know about Don Hector.’
‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘I’m only dreaming I’m him.’
But there was something, as there was when I was Birgitta’s husband. Vague, nebulous, but there, crouching in the back of my mind like a perching osprey: on a kid’s trike when I was very young, going as fast as I could on the carpeted corridor of a large country house, trying to escape something – grief, I think.
‘I was on a trike,’ I said. ‘It’s a week past Springrise, and I can recall a sense of maternal absence. I can feel the loss.’
And I could, an angry lump of emptiness that wouldn’t leave my chest. The same sort of lump I felt at the Pool when prospective parents passed unblinking on their hurried way to the other kids, the ones not made distinctly and beautifully unique by a touch of asymmetry.
‘Good – you’re in. Now listen carefully. Is there a cylinder anywhere close by?’
‘What sort of cylinder?’
‘A wax cylinder.’
‘With music on it? There’s lots in the apartment.’
‘No; in the dream. We need the cylinder – and you need to find it. Explore the recesses of Don Hector’s mind.’
I looked around. The only thing in sight other than the oak tree and the picnic and the car was the Morpheleum, sitting on the horizon.
‘There’s a temple to Morpheus. About half a mile away.’
‘Good. Try and get there. Using the Buick offers the best chance, we’ve learned.’
‘You’ve tried it?’
‘In a manner of speaking.’
I looked at the empty space between myself and the car. It was barely ten paces away, but as I watched, a hand surfaced momentarily between myself and the Buick, then sank out of sight.
‘I can’t,’ I said.
‘The hands?’
‘Yes, the hands. They’ll get me.’
‘They’ll always get you, Charlie. Trying to drive to the temple, not being able to. Anything to stop you finding the cylinder, stop you reaching the Morpheleum. But the cylinder is in there somewhere. The temple is a good start. The clock is running – I suggest you start driving, and fast.’
I elected to do as she said, but then noticed with a feeling of dread that the hands were not simply severed hands, but small hand-like creatures, the wrist domed over with skin like a healed stump, and not looking like part of a human at all. I put my own hand in my pocket, pulled out a rabbit’s-foot key ring and made a dash for the Buick.
I couldn’t run as fast as I wanted. I was weak, and my feet felt draggy. Within a few paces I could sense the hands grasp the hem of my trousers, and from here they started to climb my legs, making me heavier, impeding my progress. I made it to the car and tried to get in but the weight and volume of the hands made it impossible to move, let alone drive. I kicked and pushed and tore at the hands but even if I dislodged one, two more would stream out of the earth to take their place. I heaved myself into the driver’s seat and slipped the key into the ignition. The oil and generator lights flicked on and the car’s engine burst into life. Without a foot to work the clutch, I simply pushed the gear lever into first. The gearbox clunked, the car lurched and the engine stalled. I shouted as a wave of hands erupted from the soil, flowed into the car in a flood and covered my face and then dragged me outside. I had a fleeting glimpse of the shimmery Mrs Nesbit before I was pulled beneath the ground, the taste of soil in my mouth, the earth above me pressing heavily on my chest and a sense of enveloping darkness. I tried to yell but my mouth was full of dry soil and—
—a voice. But not Mrs Nesbit’s.
‘What are you still doing here?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I’ll rephrase that: what in all that’s cold and dead and putrid are you still doing here?’