Exhaling loudly, he checks the diver's watch on his freckly wrist and thinks of the approaching interview. Talking to an English girl about her nightmares should be routine. Pressures of late adolescence and the stresses of a student lifestyle can create any number of recurring nightmares in a young mind. And perhaps there will be no connection between the reports his e-mail service in Nairobi was receiving from St Andrews, and what he's been studying in Africa, Asia and North America. It could be a waste of time: another one. But he has to be sure.
When his friend, Adolpho, first sent him an e-mail from the Anthropology Department at St Andrews, two months earlier, the news had been tragic. A fourth-year student, Ben Carter, had committed an unusual suicide. The history undergraduate had burned himself to death in the car given to him by his parents on his twenty-first birthday. According to Adolpho, who knew Carter personally, the undergraduate had been sleeping poorly for months, had become increasingly withdrawn throughout his final year, and failed to show for his exams. More importantly, prior to his death, Ben Carter had become terrified of the night and the vivid terrors that came with it. And, according to rumour, he was not alone.
With the offer of Adolpho's flat, rent-free for a month, Hart booked airline tickets immediately. Although his sponsorship grant and the publisher's advance for his book on dream culture in primitive society had nearly run dry, Adolpho's e-mail message had excited him enough to make him head for the airport the minute his work in Africa concluded. This new territory was special. Of all places, a night-terror phenomenon could be occurring in Scotland. That would cover Northern Europe and the last ground in Hart's rarely studied global puzzle.
After spending his first two days in bed, or on the toilet, recovering from jetlag, a hangover, and a recurring bout of amoebic dysentery, he began posting his flyers at strategic locations around the town, invariably popular with students at any university: the library by necessity, the Student Union complex on Market Street, and the Union diner on North Street. And within an hour of the first poster going up, a message from a young student called Kerry Sewell had been left on his answering machine:
'Hello, Mr Miller. I'd like to see you urgently. I'm a student here. Art History. And when I saw the flyer in the library… It's so odd, it's as if you knew. I really need to see you soon. About the night terror thing. The sooner the better. It is confidential, isn't it?'
Hart had called her straight back and arranged the first interview. Now, in an attempt to relax before the girl arrives, he turns on his small portable stereo and plays American Beauty by the Grateful Dead, an album full of summer memories from his youth in Chicago. And while he nods his head to the lonesome and mellow harmonies, he continues to pull on the Laphroaig bottle and to enjoy the throat-burn and stomach-glow. But right before the first chorus of 'Friend of the Devil', the front doorbell emits a single solemn chime.
Hart leaps up from the rug, staggers forward, bangs his shins on the corner of the coffee table and shouts, 'Shit!' Hurriedly, he wipes his mouth and runs back and forth with the bottle before he finds a place to hide it, behind a stack of tomes on the dining table. After rinsing Listerine through his cheeks and over his teeth, he then siphons it through his lips into the kitchen sink. Smoothing out the front of his red flannel shirt with the moist palms of his hands, he trots down the narrow staircase to the ground-floor reception.
Through the glass in the top portion of the front door, he sees the profile of a tall girl. Stylish tortoiseshell sunglasses conceal her eyes. Shoulder-length hair, ice-blonde in colour, is tied at the back of her head with a black velvet band, which gives the effect of sharpening her already striking cheekbones. But her young face, that in any circumstance is arresting, seems distracted. Although she gazes down Market Street, so bright with sunlight, toward the large and modern Student Union building, it is as if she sees nothing. 'Jeez,' Hart mutters. She is nearly a foot taller than him and he can already smell money.
When he opens the door, she turns to face him. Her tight lips part and there is a pause — a fathoming — before she says, 'Hi.'
'Hey now,' Hart replies, nodding his head to some inner rhythm and raising both hands as if he has just met an old friend unexpectedly, and wants to do nothing more than spend time with them. 'Let me guess. I'm not what you were expecting,' he says.
Kerry pushes her sunglasses up and into her hair. 'No.' She slinks through the doorway, blinking her pale-blue eyes quickly as she scans the walls. Sensing distress, Hart manages to sustain his characteristic warmth and endearing smile, in an attempt to put her at ease. 'Up there?' she says, and points toward the open doorway at the top of the staircase.
'Yeah, yeah, go on up, honey.'
With his eyes fixed on her wrap-around skirt, which is long and falls to the top of her leather boots, he follows her up the stairs to the lounge. As the stairs groan and creak beneath them, he becomes conscious of inhaling her fragrance across his copper-wire moustache. After Africa, and Guatemala before that, it is a sudden but refreshing opportunity to share time and space with all the things he enjoys about Western women: perfume, shaven legs, and painted lips. He briefly entertains an image of Kerry, naked, in his mind, but then dismisses it, feeling ashamed. After so long in the wilderness he suddenly worries about blowing his first lead with an inappropriate leer.
'So, Kerry, you saw the flyer in the library,' he says with a chuckle when they reach the lounge. 'I've been pasting those things all over town.'
She stays quiet. Hart loses his grin, fast. 'Sit down, honey. Umm, let me get you a drink. I haven't had time to go to the store, but I have some coffee. It was in the cupboard when I arrived. Guess I inherited it.'
Kerry approaches the couch. 'That would be nice.'
As he gets busy in the kitchen, he hears Kerry sit down in the lounge. When she crosses her long legs, the little whisper created by the innocent gesture runs a prickle down the nape of his neck. Shake it off, he tells himself. This ain't a date. Don't start with some Woody Allen routine. Ensconced in the kitchen, out of sight, he also looks at his hands and sees shakes. Christ, I'm an anthropologist. What if she needs a doctor?
'Will you be taping this?' Kerry asks, and he thinks her voice sounds even more feminine with the cultured English accent. It drifts through the arched white portal, separating the lounge and kitchen. 'Sure,' he says. 'But don't worry about a thing. If it fits my study, I'd like to use it for my book. With your permission of course, and I can always change the names.' Holding two cups of black coffee that steam in his chubby paws, Hart reappears in the lounge. 'Like it black?'
Kerry nods. Hart blushes. 'Just as well, there's no milk.' With the cups placed on the table between them, he pulls a wooden chair around to host his bulbous hips.
'It's OK about taping me,' she says. 'I'm just a little delicate at the moment. I've not been sleeping.'
'Go on.'
'Well it's very strange. I… I think I could be losing my mind.' The skin across the thin bones of her face blanches, losing its honey coloured sheen, and after she speaks there follows a nervous and apologetic giggle before she dips her head. A long silence follows and Hart begins to fiddle with his beard. Finally, he smacks his lips, and rubs his hands down the front of his weathered combat trousers.
'Don't be ashamed of anything, Kerry. Just feel free to let go. I got two good ears here and a lot of experience in this field. It doesn't matter how wacky you think your dreams are, I want to hear everything you can remember about them.'