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.
F
I V E
For
years I cannot hum a bit
Or sing the smallest song;
And
this the
dreadful reason is,
My legs are grown too long!
—Edward Lear
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."