WHAT DREAMS MAY COME
a collaboration with David Price


If it hadn't been for an overturned bottle of Veuve Cliquot and two half-eaten bowls of sushi, you'd swear the room had never been lived in. It had been cosy enough the last time I'd been there; but now there was a chill in the air, condensation creeping down the walls. I zipped up my jacket, even though I suspected the coldness to be nothing more than a product of my own, very vivid imagination.

But something very bad had happened in this room, of that I was certain.

What had caused Leonard and Kate Lawler to flee their home?

I surveyed the room – the half-eaten meal, the CD which was still playing Sinatra, the candles on the table which had all-but burned themselves out – and felt a chill in the pit of my stomach. It had been growing ever since I'd arrived and found the door ajar, then in the hall where I'd called out their names. My voice echoed around the walls as though I'd just entered a vast cavern instead of a semi-detached house. There was no smell of must, no accumulation of dust and cobwebs; just a feeling that the place had been abandoned for a very long time.

I left the living room, exploring the bedrooms, bathroom, conservatory. I even climbed up to the attic. I should have felt like an intruder, but I didn't; this was a totally impersonal environment, like the house of a famous person that had been recreated as a museum exhibit.

At this thought I developed a feeling of being watched, and began casting anxious glances around me.

Cursing my paranoia, I returned to the living room, still uneasy, but more concerned for my friends; less than an hour had passed since we'd spoken over the 'phone, and there'd been no hint of trouble then; whatever happened in this house had been sudden and totally unexpected.

I took one of the Lawler's art deco candle holders from a glass cabinet and smacked it against the palm of my hand. It was solid, as good a weapon as any. Oh yes, I really was naïve enough to think that an object thirteen inches long and no thicker than a man's thumb would be good enough to protect me.

I left the house, looking up and down The Mews. There were fourteen houses in all, each occupied by well off people; all double glazed, each door and window protected by intricate burglar alarms. And every one seemed as desolate as the house I had just left.(I might have been standing in the middle of a deserted film set; the camera's put away, the actor's and technicians gone to bed).

Surely I was wrong. The whole street couldn't just have vanished.



The subject is showing signs of awareness –

Simple brain patterns. You are reading too much into them-

Maybe. He is worth monitoring –



Suddenly - breaking through my wild preoccupations – I saw a single, ancient box brownie camera sitting in the gutter. I picked it up, dusted it off and peered into the viewfinder. These were automatic movements on my part; half derived from my knowledge of the Lawler's as collectors of such memorabilia from fifties and sixties Britain. The other half of the impulse was simply needing something to occupy my hands.

Through the aperture, I homed in on another object that appeared wedged between the bottom of the lawler's garden fence and the pavement, distinguishable from the more general litter by its apparent ability to move. It was a dead dog; so dead, the maggots gave it a semblance of life.

I lowered the camera and discovered that there was nothing like that really there, only a lolly stick and a blue rizla packet; still full, by the look of it. I raised the camera and there it was – via the lens – the remains of Kate Lawler's Trajan, that dog I'd often tickled under the chin; the friendliest mastiff this side of the Bristol channel, now fast becoming unrecognisable, even as a corpse.

"Won't last for long."

The voice brought me back to some semblance of life; having, no doubt, been stuck rigid for at least a few minutes. The voice strangely calmed me.

I thought I knew who used such a voice; somebody I loved dearly, and had died many years in the past.

"Nanna?"

My voice piped like the child I had been when she was alive. She was dressed in black and white – and her face was grey. Her fashionable gloves – which she insisted on wearing in public whatever the weather – appeared stone-washed.

"Say cheese," I said, and without warning, clicked the shutter.

I wondered why she left me. I'd been confused as a child, because my parents had quenched my gullible questions by saying Nanna had gone to a better place, where she'd play in gossamer meadows under silken skies with many of her Victorian playmates from schooldays.

And now I felt my heart empty again. And there is more space to be empty in an adult heart; a child's heart keeps the future inside it so it never seems half as empty as it might have been.

I was merely thankful I had never seen Nanna with maggots moving her.



Definite signs of emotion, I'd say –

That doesn't prove a thing. Under the circumstances, a confused reading is only to be expected –



My revery was broken by Kate's voice calling for Trajan and a waft of Sinatra. I turned but saw nothing. Perceived, yes, and if I' raised the camera I might well have seen her. But I couldn't bring myself to do this, the thought of seeing her beautiful face crawling with maggots staying my hand.

AND NOW THE END IS NEAR, Sinatra started singing.

But who was facing the final curtain?

The camera whirred, a photograph slid out of a gap at the bottom. To my knowledge, the old brownie box had never been able to do this; but then, they'd never been able to show you the inside of another dimension, either. I took the photograph out. A pretty young girl, some five or six years of age, smiled back at me. Her dress was late Victorian – lots of frills and a ridiculously large bonnet – and behind her, a magnificent-looking steed. A recently taken photograph, yet it had been posed for in 1898. This was my Nanna, over a hundred years ago, standing outside a stable that had once stood in what was now the Lawler's back garden.

The photograph began to fade, yellow, and curl around the edges as time seemed to catch up with it. I let it fall to the ground, watched it disintegrate. When I looked up a tall, elegant lady, some twenty years of age, was sitting atop a stallion. It was my Nanna again, as she had been during the early years of The Great War.

She raised her whip in greeting.

"A beautiful morning," she said.

I could sense a presence behind me. The Lawler's and their dog, perhaps; maybe even a complete stranger.

"You're not real," I argued. "None of this is real."

"Oh but it's real to you," my Nanna replied.

"You died a long time ago."

"I've never been dead. Not to you."

And this was certainly true; as a child, in times of illness or loneliness, she would become a (imaginary) comforting friend. My Nanna, who hadn't died, but moved to an idyllic country retreat with her old friends.

Had I willed her to be alive so much that she had actually returned? And if so, where did the Lawler's fit in?

"Are you thinking about your friends? You must be wondering what became of them?"

"What do you know?"

She smiled, and there was the slightest hint of cruelty in her eyes.

"You have the answer," she said. "Look all around you – can't you see the decay that lies beneath the surface gloss? Of course not, because you always blot out the bad things." And she lightly cracked the whip across the horse's flanks. It trotted forward a few paces, then vanished as though swallowed by an invisible mist.

Several more photographs slid out of the camera, snapshots of the residents of The Mews. Had this camera captured their souls? Had they been spirited away to some dark-room-created sepia world? The road was desolate, yet I no longer felt alone.

Did I dare raise the camera to my eyes again?

I glanced back at the house; it looked as if it should have been condemned.

How many bodies were crawling with maggots in there now?

I looked at the camera. One snapshot left. The candle holder in my pocket no longer gave the comfort it had offered just five minutes ago, but I still had to know the answer. Turning the camera on myself, I looked into the lens, hesitated…then took my own photograph. It was time to meet The Devil face to face.



*



This one came out in colour, a panoramic Polaroid slipping like fax paper from the antique netherslot of the Box Brownie; pixelled and polkadotted, poxed and pitted.

I stared at the image. There were, by now, even deeper undercurrents of sound that made Sinatra's version of MY WAY seem lily-livered and limp-wristed. Kate Lawler, with whom, clandestinely, I had been having a squalid love affair, had often played this to me when Leonard was away on business. Now here was a vision of our runtish foreplay in various shades of red. I dashed back into the Lawler's house as if to ask for forgiveness. A self-imposed history of faithlessness and deception needed to be re-enacted, back-tracked, fast-rewound upon spools of reality so as to retrieve some dignity from earlier times. Leonard and I were old school chums and he trusted me implicitly. And the guilt of playing fast and loose with his wife had given me the seeds of guilt, which later turned into today's rampant paranoia.

The house was now lived in again. But lived in by whom? Or what?

The place stank of dog dirt. The vinyl record on the turntable was being scratched along the run-in or run-off grooves by the sapphire stylus, a rusty silence that made me think of locks grating and hinges creaking.

Something HAD happened in this room. Or was about to happen.

The sushi and Veuve Cliquot were mixing in strange porridgy rivulets across the very carpet where Kate and I had once let slip the hare from the lips of love. Maggots squirmed in this mess, making it flow where it would otherwise have been stagnant.



Now, tonight, I was alone again in this Mary Celeste of a house, waiting for fulfilment of my own emptiness.

Trajan hovered past my feet and, instead of snuffling at my groin, as was his practice in happier days, he failed even to impinge on my consciousness, except as a potential off-shoot to the screen. My Nanna then worried at the roots of my childhood, teasing out all the buds of self-disgust which had later flowered as full-blooded paranoia in middle-age. She did not even put in a reappearance, but merely masqueraded as Kate Lawler.

The television screen flickered, the images blurred … and the living room itself burst violently into life.



Increased REM activity. Something is happening!



Leonard's collection of Beatles singles started spinning across the room like Frisbees.

The posters of old Hammer Horror Films, scrunched up with dreams of becoming comic silent movies, burst into flames.

Frank Sinatra appeared, glimpsed as a hologram between the TV and the pyramid of collectable Daz and Surf boxes across the room, a crooning version that was less convincing than even a Stars In Their Eyes counterpart.

I sat still.

I had to.

You could not have slipped even a cigarette paper between the concentration and the silence.

Someone had come into the room and was examining me. I pretended to be just one of the exhibits. I dared not blink, though I knew I was no good at not blinking; I could barely move my eyeballs in their basins without ripping the optic fuses from their earths. But I did manage to raise my sight, without too much further pain or visible flethering of the pupils. It was my Nanna, I saw, now dressed in between-the-wars fashion, but still sporting those elegant gloves from an earlier epoch. She tenderly touched my temple and I begged her to take off the glove so that her touch would be as real as she looked. Then the blessing would be complete. But instead of the kind words I intended to say to her, I choked on things that should have used the lower sluices, and rizla skins rose in my gorge like sick and I foully cursed her for the guilt she'd bestowed upon me.

For a moment I was plunged into thick darkness; then, as if by a sleight-of-hand, the light from a pencil-thin candle dimly illuminated my surroundings. Everyone was there – Nanna, Len, Kate, even my ex-wife. I reached out for a comforting touch, but might just as well have reached for the moon; for only in my mind did they exist.

And, tragically, so did I.



I looked around the Lawler's living room; Overturned furniture, the dulcet tones of Sinatra mocking the carnage. This was the scene that greeted me on that terrible night.

Spilled food, an empty room…

And yet there was a void near the fireplace, an amorphous mass struggling to take shape.

I clutched the sides of my head, trying to remember, yet knowing how terrible the discovery was.

The room was cold – as cold as death – and in that void a pattern began to emerge; silver, with a hint of gold; hair, pale flesh. I stared at the emerging figure with the horrified fascination of a viewer watching animals tearing each other apart on a wildlife programme, for this was death in its most brutal form. Kate, the marks of her husbands hands about her throat and neck, her own hands still clawed in a last, desperate struggle, the state of the room evidence of that brutal tango . Her face…

In panic I fled the house, stopping for nothing. Across the garden, then onto the road where I caught my last glimpse of the world; Len's BMW racing towards me, the face behind the wheel transfixing me with an expression of sheer hatred.

And then…

Only darkness.



Now all I have is these tortured images. I'm not in the Lawler's house, or walking down The Mews. I am in the same place I have been in for the last two years; a hospital bed, the music of Sinatra piped in through the speakers, a candle-holder accommodating an incense stick in the hope that a familiar smell might stimulate my brain. But they are wrong about people in a coma, we are fully aware; even with our perceptions of reality distorted; we still think.

I am once again in the dark, trapped behind my own eyes. If I could only open those eyes, look upon the light… But my eyes have been taped shut, and the only movement I make is when the nurses manipulate my limbs to prevent atrophy. I crave escape from this prison, but fear what awaits me when I do. Will I be a drooling, mindless vegetable confined to a wheelchair, unable to communicate or feed myself? I sometimes think that a swift death would have been better that this.

My own memory is short, and much as I try to fight the visions, I will soon be thrown into another, all-too-vivid nightmare. I only remember the last one, so I have no way of knowing if the experience has ever been pleasant, or if I have just been reliving the same day – over and over – in a loop.



*



I see a light and I am drawn towards it.

My memory is fading.

Wasn't there something about a camera?

I am entering a room…


(Published 'Redsine' 2001)