Used to be, every other night I saw her. Sometimes every night. How'd I know it was night? Everybody dreams at night, don't they? Night-time was for her and me and the banal monsters and the uncanny clowns and the people you know with the faces you don't. Carnevale.
So yeah, every few nights. The dark would come out like a fox from the shadows and so would she. And there I’d be, waiting for her. Always.
There were some bizarre scenes going on back then. All sorts of weird shit with Escher hotel corridors, strange meals that refused to be cooked, and mice, for some reason. Fucking mice everywhere: underfoot, overhead, swimming in the stews and slumping out of the soufflés, skittering down the walls like rain down a windowpane.
Describe my relationship with her? What exactly do you mean by that? What, where and how often?
It wasn’t like that.
Jesus, I don’t know, what it should it have been like? What’s anything between a man and a woman like? Who am I, Sigmund Freud?
Yeah, she mentioned him. Why wouldn’t she? She’s an educated girl.
She just seemed that way. Articulate, you know? Soft-spoken.
Yes beautiful. Of course beautiful. Isn’t everybody, in dreams? Everybody you love, anyhow.
*
The first time. OK.
It was a tunnel. A dark tunnel – wet, warm, kind of like a sewer, but no smell. Can you smell in dreams? I never could. Not womblike, not really, more intestinal. A dim orange glow spilling around the corner. It wasn’t frightening, no, just … unfamiliar. I’d hurt my leg somehow, had to crawl, though there was room to stand. It was big as a tube tunnel, this place. The blood ran warm over my leg like bathwater. I knew it hurt but I couldn’t feel the pain. There’s no pain in dreams either. Except –
I didn’t hear her behind me. What with the splashing, the dripping from the ceiling, I had no idea she was there, let alone so close, until she grabbed my leg. I felt her fingers close around my ankle, cool and clean as rain, and I panicked. I jerked my leg, tried to kick her away. She could have been anything. You know what it’s like when dreams go bad.
She said my name.
I don’t know how. How do you know anything in dreams? You just know.
I stopped. I twisted over. Her face was pale in the tunnel light and her hair hung wet around it, like she was fresh from the shower. I couldn’t see her eyes but she was smiling.
Like a kid. Like a child with a present. Like she just saw her best friend for the first time after a long summer vacation. That’s how.
She said my name again. I looked down and the leg she was touching, the wound, it wasn’t bleeding any more. It was like I’d never even been hurt.
“Jesus,” she said, “is that really you?”
*
The tunnel. That was an old dream, one that could turn on a dime, turn bad. We got out of there fast and didn’t go back. We tried hotels, sure, but we never could reach each other at the end of those looping, switchback corridors. Or else I’d lose my way back to the bedroom, barge in on wrong rooms full of strangers.
The mansion was better; I think she saw it in a TV movie once. Neither of us knew our way around. Secret passages, dust everywhere and cobwebs like candyfloss. Sometimes the dust became mice, too. Gave me the fucking creeps. But even though we got lost, got dirty, at least we did it together.
We eventually decided that open air was the key. That way you can see things coming, whatever they are. There’s always somewhere to run. So we settled on meeting at a fairground – well, sometimes it was a fairground, sometimes a park or a playground: it depended on the night, on the dream. But always the same bench. Old, heavy, ornate, maybe Victorian, with wooden slats worn smooth and chipped dark-green paint.
I can see it now, so vivid; see the names carved into it. Some of them were decades old, some of them so new woodflesh was still bright in the scar. All different letterings, different angles – different alphabets, even. Like everybody had scratched their love into that thing at one time or another. Some of the names looked like when schoolkids etch their desks in exams, some were done with real craft, real attention to detail. Some were as basic as it gets. An initial, another initial, and in between them, a heart.
Whose names? Ours, of course. They were all ours.
We’d meet there and go. Anywhere, wherever she wanted. Wherever she could dream of.
Yeah, that was a good time. Dreams so good you don’t want to wake up, you know? That’s what she said to me. That she didn’t want to wake up. And I didn’t either. Want her to, I mean.
*
She confided in me, yeah. I didn’t mind. I liked to hear what she did when she was awake. And I think it comforted her, to tell me. Let her let it go. A lot of shit with work; her ex, the depression, all that. She didn’t need that. Especially not when she was asleep, when we were together. That was our time.
A few times she had anxiety dreams about work and I had to step in. Her boss tried to follow us around the fairground, but I lost him. Once he jumped out in the Tunnel of Love, dressed as a flamingo, so I tied his neck in a knot and turned him into a boat for the next couple. She laughed and said thank-you.
“Don’t thank me,” I said. “it’s your dream.”
She kissed me then. It was like the sparks you see behind your eyelids when you can’t sleep. Fireworks in the velvet void.
“It’s our dream,” she said. “Ours.”
*
Why would I talk about myself? I was happy enough just listening to her.
I thought I made her happy, too. But then she didn’t come for a long time.
Hard to tell. Weeks? Let me count the days. I lost count.
When I saw her again she looked different somehow, white and thin, light-starved like a plant. It was a park that time, I remember. We sat by the duck pond. There was a picnic blanket and a hamper but she wouldn’t eat.
She said they’d put her on new drugs. For the depression. There were side-effects. Loss of concentration, loss of appetite, even in dreams.
“It’s the pills,” she said. “I sleep all the time, but these days I hardly ever dream.”
That was where she’d been.
She looked so sad when she said it. Or maybe I did. The ducks drifted on the water like ships in mist.
Of course I wanted her to come off it. Of course I did.
Of course I didn’t say anything.
*
The last time was a long while after. She’d come back once or twice, but the dreams were strange and pale, like old black-and-white movies, like something photocopied too much, and so was she.
She said she was doing better. In her waking life, that is. Coping.
What did I say? I said that was good.
We walked through the fairground, her hand cold in mine. I bought her candyfloss, but it didn’t taste of anything. She said she didn’t think she could see me any more. She wanted to, but the drugs kept her away. Like a mist she couldn’t find her way through.
And she smiled.
Like a kid who's just broken a toy, that’s how. Like saying goodbye to her best friend for the long summer vacation.
*
No, I don’t want to move. I’m fine here. With the ducks and the carousel and all. Of course I can’t see them now, but I know they’re there. Just out of sight, just through the mist. Just like I know she is.
I’ll wait. What else have I got to do?
As long as it takes. I owe her everything. She thought me up in the first place, after all. Her dream-boy. My dream-girl.
I know she’ll come back. When she gets her head straight, when she doesn’t need the drugs any more. One night the mist will just melt away like candyfloss on your tongue, the dark will come out like a fox from the shadows, and so will she. And there I’ll be, waiting for her. Always.
(c) Maria Kyle, 2007
If you would like to read more stories like this one, check out Weird Lies, the award-winning Arachne Press anthology in which it, and many other fantastical stories from the League archives, appears.
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