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.
S I X
If we swallow arsenic we must be poisoned, and he
who
dreams as I have done, must be troubled
—William
Cowper
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-f 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.
PART TWO
April
1974
O N E
Remember not the sins and
offences of my youth
—1662 Prayer Book