—What are you doing?—
—Prove it to me—Brad said again.
—Don’t—said Honora, unable to take her eyes from his.
Brad didn’t take a single step closer, but he continued to fix her with his gaze. She was unable to move. She felt the silver buckle of the patent leather belt around her skirt open, the belt passing itself through the loops of her skirt, moving off her like a live thing, like a snake which dropped at her feet. Then she felt a button of her blouse gently popping open above her breasts, followed by the next, and the next down to her waist, and the blouse being lifted back from her shoulders exposing her breasts to him.
—Don’t—Honora said again, her arms fallen at her side, held down by a strange paralysis, not knowing how to resist, wanting to fight back and reverse what was happening, think it back as with the elementals, but not finding the strength.
—You can stop it any time you want—he said.
—God, I just can’t move! Don’t you see I don’t want this?—
—Any time you want—
Was he right? Could she stop it? She tried, but couldn’t. There was nothing she could do. Then she felt the button go at the side of her skirt and heard the tooth rasp of the zip opening, and the skirt fell around her legs, lying in a hoop at her feet. At last she felt the elastic of her panties being rolled down her thighs and falling to her feet.
Brad stepped forward.
Control. Lee fought for control, imagining that Ella’s sharp fingernails on his throat were indeed a knife, until in the dream it was the gleaming blade she would plunge into his neck if he failed to please her; open the door, I love you for ever, he pushed inside her and she squeezed him to her, laying her head back on the grass. It was unbearable this dreamside sex, like making love on a live cable of electric wire. Stay with it, she was whispering, stay with it, but he knew it would have to finish or stop or the dream must break. He was clenching handfuls of her hair in his fists and the grass and daisies growing at the side of her head were mixed up in her hair, and she became a human shape of glittering white-hot energy, pulsating and glittering and burning. He felt they were making love astride a howling wind and over a rushing current and then when he felt her coming he gave in to the current and the wind and felt his body spurting light from every pore of his body as the dream imploded and was over.
The next morning Lee woke up next to Ella, feeling strange, dislocated and energized. She was still sleeping. He kissed her, and in her hair he found a daisy head, two daisy heads, and torn blades of grass. He woke Ella to show them to her.
Grass and daisy heads on the pillow: evidence in the day’s eye of what had been transported from dreamside.
Honora Brennan woke up alone in her bed and pushed back the bedcovers to inspect the speckled crimson stains on the sheets, as if a pressed flower had been squeezed into the linen.
Honora felt inside herself for the blood of the broken hymen.
SIXTEEN
Honora was not seen on dreamside again. It was obvious to the other three that she had made a conscious decision not to return there. It must have taken some struggle. Entry into dreamside had once required considerable discipline and effort; now they were caught in an undertow which delivered them there unasked, and not to be drawn there whenever they slept required serious resistance.
Ella had her suspicions about what was happening. She sensed that Brad Cousins was in some malevolent way responsible, though she was unable to guess why. And he wouldn’t be drawn.
“What happened between you two?” she asked for the fifth time. They sat in a pub with ultraviolet strip lighting and a jukebox belting out Motown classics. Brad offered a shrug.
“Don’t try to dismiss the question, Brad.”
“I’m not trying to dismiss the question, I am dismissing the question.”
“Something happened on dreamside that’s made her cut herself off from us, and I know it’s something you did.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because you’ve the guts of a sewer rat.”
“Ease up Ella,” said Lee, bringing in the beer. “Tell us what happened when you went to her room.”
“She was in there. I know it. She pretended she wasn’t. I even shouted that I knew she was there, but she wouldn’t open the door and she wouldn’t speak to me.” She jabbed a finger dangerously close to Brad’s face. “He’s responsible.”
“It’s been nearly five weeks,” said Lee.
“You know what it’s about, don’t you Brad?”
“Get off my back. Go and ask her for Christ’s sake.”
“No, I’m asking you.” Ella turned to Lee. “Honora won’t speak to us, so we’ve only got this reptile to tell us.”
Brad suddenly slammed down his pint glass sending a tide of beer cascading across the table. Lee and Ella jumped back. “Why don’t you get a muzzle on that rabid mouth of yours, jealous bitch.” He stormed out of the bar, slamming a foot into the jukebox and bouncing the stylus into silence.
“You asked for that,” said Lee.
Ella had actually paid three unanswered visits to Honora’s room. Each time there had been a light on and a radio playing, but Honora had consistently refused to respond. They never saw her around the university campus and she didn’t attend lectures.
Visits to dreamside were never quite the same again. There was a marked down-turn in the excitement of just being there. The sense of expectation had died. Before, the place had always been seeded with the scent of honeysuckle. Now it was flat and perfumeless, and troubled by underlying anxieties more felt than understood. They never referred to this anxiety, and the more it went unspoken, the more it grew. Without saying anything, they found themselves resisting the powerful undertow that had been taking them unasked for so long. They were shocked at the effort required to stay away, but eventually their visits thinned out, then dried up completely.
In waking time, things started to go badly for Ella and Lee too. Perhaps this deterioration in their relationship caused the dreamside sag. When it came down to it, the best part of their romance had been conducted on dreamside, and sometimes, now, they were at a loss with each other’s ordinariness.
One afternoon Lee looked at Ella, and where he had formerly seen an exotic priestess, there was now a girl with scuffed shoes and hastily applied lipstick.
Ella woke up one morning, and where she had once lain with a young warrior bearing a flaming torch into the dark labyrinths of the psyche, she now found herself in bed alongside a boy with a fluffy beard, who hadn’t much to say for himself.
Problems were compounded when Brad “confessed” to Lee that he and Ella had, on occasion, successfully conducted their own dreamtime rendezvous. Lee was genuinely shocked. It had never occurred to him that other dreamtime activities might have been going on in his absence.
“It’s a lie,” Ella protested, “and it’s ridiculous.”
“Maybe that’s what he meant when he called you jealous.”
“I don’t believe I’m hearing this! You take in any lie that ape comes out with, and you don’t believe a word I say! How can you do that to me?”