When I say, My bed shall comfort me, my couch shall ease my complaint; then thou scarest me with dreams, and terrifiest me through visions.
It was Good Friday. Honora had protested seven changes of heart, but Ella had managed to deliver her that afternoon to a small modern Catholic church near by. Ella watched her go in with her head bowed, and sat waiting in the car with the radio turned up.
Inside, Honora sat through the service with a hardened resistance. She dutifully kissed the cross when called, and took the sacrament, though mechanically, feeling nothing. But in the confessional she asked for the young priest’s blessing and revealed the entire story in terms of a catalogue of sin until the priest, at last realizing the depth of her distress, asked her to stop.
She emerged from the church and got into Ella’s car.
“Well?”
“It’s a bit like going to the dentist after a long absence. I’ve got to go back tomorrow and have some more done.”
“Is that usual?”
“Only for us very bad mortal sinners,” she smiled. “Actually, it was me; I asked if he would talk to me tomorrow. There was a whole row of people ready with their fictitious confessions, and I was holding them up.”
“What’s he like?”
“Young. Quite nice.”
“Tasty?”
“Get on, Ella. He’s a priest!”
Ella was relieved that Honora could be light. They had a private joke about the priest, which they kept from Lee, who wanted to know what they were giggling about. That night Honora slept deep and free of the pull of dreamside. It was the first time since the dreaming had started up again.
In the morning, Ella drove to the church, watched Honora go in, and waited in the car again.
But Lee had not been free of dreams. Although spared the direct dreamside experience, he’d spent feverish nights in the grip of anxiety. Now there were two strange women in his house, conspiring to draw him into complex plans of action, all based around phantom events. Something was closing on him, something he’d held off for a long time. Ella and Honora, just by being there in his house, opened the crack between the worlds and made him believe in things he’d had to work hard to dismiss. They undermined his sealed, ordered world.
Still Lee maintained incredulity at Honora’s story of dreamside conception and delivery, but Ella had refused to let him challenge the idea.
“Get a grip on reality,” he had urged.
“You’ve forgotten everything you learned,” Ella hissed. “Try telling that to Honora. In reality, in the dream, in the mind,” prodding her own head for effect with an angry, stiff finger, “you’re sure you know the difference?”
“There’s a clear difference. A very clear difference.”
“Is there?”
Lee had remained awake for hours, staring into the gloomy shadows of the darkened bedroom, looking for very clear differences.
But it was only when he had the house to himself that he had the space to think things through. He wanted to chart his own course. After all, who was this Ella? Not the same person he knew thirteen years ago, in the days when the desire to believe anything (so long as it was bizarre enough) far outweighed any interest in seeing things clearly. Lee had heard precious little about what had happened in the intervening period, only that it was X-rated. What was he supposed to make of that? And what was he to think about being rewritten into the script? So much had happened to them; they couldn’t possibly be the people they once were.
But why had it taken only moments to put the clock back, make love on the rug and reopen this obsession with dreaming? The answer to that, he knew, was Ella: it was what Ella wanted. He only ever seemed to figure passively. She blew into his house like a high wind, undressed on his rug and stood over him: she slept in his bed and she made him dream again. Then after that she dragged poor ill Honora all the way over from Ireland to be mad in the house with them.
Lee began to suspect that it might be Ella, after all, who was in the business of dream resurrection. He strode out to the garden shed and emerged with a stepladder. He brought it indoors and set it up on the landing directly beneath the hatch to the attic. Then he went off in search of a torch.
Inside the church Father Boyle was watering a vase of irises. Otherwise the church was empty. On a blue wall, painted in golden lettering were the words HERE I AM LORD.
He was a couple of years younger than her, with a freckle face and close-cropped sandy hair. His piercing blue eyes were moist with enthusiasm. Honora had only ever experienced priestly powers vested in men much older. She had never been expected to respect the spiritual authority of someone younger than herself.
He looked up as he heard the door close. “Come in, Honora; see, I didn’t forget you. You know, a funny thing happened last night. I went to sleep and I had a dream, well it was all mixed up; but the thing is, I knew that I was dreaming.” He set down his watering can with a bump.
“At least, that was the only thing that was clear. What do you make of that? Isn’t that something like you were saying to me yesterday?”
“Something like that, Father.” It seemed slightly ridiculous to call this smiling boy “father.”
“Do you want to tell me again? Not as in the confession; I think we dealt with that—as far as I understood it to be a mountain of mortal sins.” He seemed to make light of it. “But I got a bit confused about whether or not these sins were actually committed or dreamed about.”
“You’re not going to be much clearer whichever way I tell it.” Try me.
She could see that he wanted to help. Not in the ritualized way of the priests she remembered, or at least not just in that manner, but through some more earthly, human contract. He looked even younger than she had at first thought as he leaned towards her solicitously. Suddenly he said, “Put aside what may be sin or sinning— you’re here and I’m here, let’s talk it through.”
“You’re kind, Father. Here goes.” Honora took the priest through the story, leaving out nothing. He listened attentively, nodding throughout and stroking his beardless chin. He interrupted her only twice; once to clarify what she had said about the discovery of blood, and then to ask her for some details concerning her attempted suicide.
“You probably think I need a psychiatrist, not a priest,” said Honora.
“Not at all.”
“Yes you do. You think I’m an hysteric.”
“No. I’ll admit I’m baffled, bewildered, confused by what you’ve told me. It goes beyond my… beyond the range of my confessional. But I have to believe in your unburdening.”
They were silent for a while. The priest coughed and started uncertainly, “A lot of people, when they want to… unburden, can’t face the realization of their own sin. They often tell me that they weren’t… in possession of themselves at the time. They were drunk, perhaps had taken drugs, or sometimes they tell me they were sleepwalking or in a trance, a daze, a fog; and occasionally they tell me…”
“They thought they were dreaming.” Honora looked away.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be so banal.”
“It’s not in my head, Father. There are other people who were involved who can tell you; I’ve already said that. One of them is sitting outside in a car waiting for me.”
“The other woman—is she a Catholic?”
“Ha!”
“But it was her idea for you to come? Interesting!”
“The point is that if it was just me, I might believe that I was off my head; but there were a number of others involved. We weren’t hallucinating, or drunk, or stoned, and in those days we were all reasonably sane God forgive us, we were just… dreaming, dreaming, I want to say dreaming but there should be another word for what was happening!”