Published 'Skeleton Girls' 1995

The female creature had sharpened fingernails, one of which she viciously dug into Bell's cheek. The blood gouted as if a bomb had dropped on a high pressure mains...

It was wilder on each occasion: including the waking up process itself when the drone of an aeroplane  above the house sent the eardrums into deep murmur and mumble.

Forty years since the war's end, and here Bell imagined it still going on. The contemporary newspapers rang with the Berlin Wall's dismantlement as Old Europe's face assumed a new disguise. What was more, an anachronistic pilot maintained a blitz of London single-handed, for whom alone the War perhaps had never ended: trying to stir the embers of man's natural antagonism to man by releasing a dream bomb on Bell.

He woke with a start. He knew dreams within dreams could not be allowed to continue or one of them might take on a semblance of unshakeable reality. The Berlin Wall was a fixture, after all - its crumbling even more unlikely than the London skyline being without the dome of St Paul's Cathedral as a credential.

Bell peeled off a black sticker from an album beside the bed. He applied this sticker to the wall mirror. He never questioned such a routine: rather like an assassin would notch his gun handle (uno for an enemy soldier, duo for a nun, tres for a new born baby). The stickers were mementoes, insignia, regalia, accoutrements - of dreams had. Sometimes the sticker was white: an inch by inch square. Often both black and white: with straight or blurred divisions. Sometimes slightly smaller, sometimes bigger, but always square enough to fit like straight jigsaw bits.

He needed faith in the reality of reality and in dreaming's discontinuity and such faith entailed returning to this room, find the sticker album, knowing intuitively the exact place on the mirror's surface to affix the next randomly chosen one and, finally, with a flourish and a fanfare of tuneless humming, pressing it neatly next to its neighbour.

Bell would soon not be able to see his own face in the mirror at all.

One dream he feared more than any other was the female, with nails sharp enough to worry and tease the edges of the stickers and eventually flay them from the mirror. He would shake and shiver, not even able at first to establish the album's whereabouts nor even possessing fingers nimble enough to pick a sticker out.

In the early days, he thought the evolving design of stuck stamps was a Jackson Pollock mishmash of monochrome. No rhyme or reason to the shapes and smudges of black into white, white into black. They were predominantly spreading from the left hand side of the mirror in a snowstorm. But then, after a spate of dreamless nights, he surrendered any idea of ever finishing it.

Eventually, a pure white shape began to form about three-quarters of the way up, subtly widening out as it angled downwards at about forty-five degrees. For several weeks of sporadic dreaming, each stamp was an untarnished white. There were, of course, various shades of black which intervened, but always positioned to leave the white shape uncorrupted.

There was a partially recognisable shape emerging: as if real life was in slow motion, compared to the speed of his dreams. Holding his breath, to die...

One night, when Bell dreamed of the aeroplane droning over his house, even the bombdoors unlatching could be heard followed by the half-stifled shrieking whistle of a short­cut doodlebug rocket.

     He woke - thankfully before whatever was dropped fell on his house. But the sticker that night was convincing: the last one that formed the camel's back. How could he have been so blind? The design on the mirror was not a wartime St Paul's Cathedral amid revolv­ing floodlight as he had once assumed - but one half of an old-fashioned aeroplane battling against so much snow the driving flakes seemed like the ghosts of killer bees.

Bell was crazy to finish the design, even if stickers needed to be ripped off galore without first dreaming the concomitant dreams. The grid built up under flickering fingernails, square by square. A star on the plane's wing. Heading into a snowflake flak over the dark seas of time past … cheating the wind.

The final stamp fitted perfectly. There seemed to be a dome, too far back for a cockpit. Was this a consolation prize for the plane's design not being a mandala of his favourite St Paul's Cathedral? He knew next to nothing  of mantras, let alone Fokkers, to appreciate the plane's significance or, even, trade-mark of manufacture. He understood too little to know how wrong any guess would be wrong, whatever decided. That was the way fantasies were built up: with bricks that seemed to fit, until they toppled.

The relentless droning above went unnoticed - despite being fully awake by now. The noise was too obvious. He had encountered it too often in dreams, teasing the sensitive eardrums with barely heard undergrunts of vibration. In real life, it was there and not there at one and the same time. Crossing the wall of the mind he heard the bomblatch slip...

       Bell woke, not with a start, but an ending. The bedroom's walls were shimmeringly illuminated by a city ablaze. The doomish domish silhouette decked with black streamers of shadowed flame. The mirror reflected shunting ghosts and living smoke. Bell  stared wild-eyed at the image of self staring wild-eyed at its replica. Raising his sharpened red-painted fingerclaw, Bell gouged a deliberate divot in his own closely shaved cheek.   His engorged thigh-trapped privates exploded bony gristle and pomegranate-like seeds towards the sticky magnet of the mirror. Simply one more single-minded skirmish in the eternal battle of sex against sex. A tectonic incontinence as not one, but two domes rose through his chest hair. Then nothing but dream masquerading as the reality of a new world order...

(Dedicated to Paola whose name was given to me by the Skeleton Girls as someone to whom they wanted the story dedicated.)